Jim DeMint and Educational Malachievement...

So Jim DeMint, Republican senator from South Carolina, said at yesterday's Senate hearing on JP Morgan Chase's $2 to $3 billion dollar loss at which Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon testified, that we shouldn't sit in judgement on JP Morgan Chase for its losses because the federal government looses that much every single day. So does DeMint think that, analytically speaking, it is possible to compare a for profit economic mega-bureaucracy whose reason to be is to increase profits with a not-for-profit governmental bureaucracy? And if he does what does this say about critical thinking and education in the United States? DeMint, by the way, apparently went to the University of Tennessee and Clemson University where he took, surprise, surprise, an MBA.

Speaking of MBA's I have never really understood why we need business schools when, according to free market cheerleaders, markets, when markets are free, are guided by an invisible free hand (praise be Adam Smith) and consumers are rational economic beings who have in their very DNA, religious or secular, the laws of supply and demand. Both of these presuppositions would seem to suggest that education in how markets operate and the divine or natural laws of supply and demand are redundant and wasteful.

By the way, I do realise that the federal government, at least ostensibly, is not a for profit entity. I suppose, however, that it might be possible to argue that federal politicians, like, you guessed it, Jim DeMint, might be said to use government in a for profit kind of way for after all they do get good salaries, superb universal, for them, health care, and develop ties to private economic bureaucracies and the campaign contributions they get from them while in office. And once they leave office they often go through the revolving door from government into private mega-corporate businesses where they can and do really earn the big megabucks by, surprise, surprise, lobbying and manipulating the very government they used to work for. Welcome to American oligarchracy.