little air pollution, because there are only about 200 of them left on the streets. True, Studebaker is out of business, but the government could leave a box of investment money in the empty lot where the Studebaker factory used to be, and semiskilled workers could come by and take what they need. Plus, if the government controlled the investment industry, those pirates in neckties would be replaced by civil servants on modest salaries. Your investment decisions would be made by government employees, people like, in Arkansas for instance, Paula Jones. You could have your whole retirement fund tied up in a failed lawsuit about the president’s dick. Maybe we should leave government out of it. Maybe we should select a committee of wise and principled individuals to guide the global investment markets—Mario Cuomo, Toni Morrison, Václav Havel, Oprah, the Dalai Lama, Alec Baldwin, and Kim Basinger. The committee would consider such matters as product safety, environmental impact, social justice between rich and poor nations, and whether a corporation has a “glass ceiling” for women executives. Then the committee would allocate capital accordingly. Kim can be very persuasive on the subject of animal rights. Now your retirement fund consists of a thousand bunny rabbits that have been rescued from medical testing. Or we could leave the investment industry pretty much alone and just divide its profits evenly. Bill Gates heads an enormous corporation in Redmond, Washington. You teach data processing at a community college in Akron, Ohio. At the end of the year, Bill and you—and everybody else—divvy up. Once. After that, Bill may decide that running Microsoft is an awful lot of work. For the same money, he might as well swipe your job teaching data processing. He certainly has the clothes for it. Or we could all just move to North Korea and eat tree bark. Wall Street’s free-market capitalism is doubtless a wonderful thing and a boon to humanity, but it scared me. The free market scared me even when I watched it function under the rule of law. Capitalism scared me despite the fact that I was seeing it operate within a well-defined set of rules understood by all the players. And I liked the players. Capitalists are at least as honest and nice as the people I know who don’t have capital. But I was still scared. Free-market capitalism was terrifying under the best circumstances. What it was like under the worst circumstance, I couldn’t imagine. And because I
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