I don’t have an iPhone because I don’t want it. I’m content with my Blackberry. I resent the idea and the subtle implication that I need things today that I didn’t need yesterday, like some fancy new app. The other day I received a phone call from my mobile company telling me that now that Blackberry is bankrupt I should switch to any other phone. What do you have? I inquired. Touchscreens, the young kid on the other side said. But what if I don’t want a touchscreen? He didn’t have an answer other than to subtly emphasize the point that I live in a stone age. That pisses me off. I think that’s the biggest folly of supply-side economics: they don’t give a fuck about what you like, they tell you what you should like. This is where the glorified free markets system break down. It shoves products on me that I don’t want, and denies me the products that I like. At some point in the business cycle companies won’t care to deliver a quality service to its customers. They will morph into a business model that functions by collecting more and more fees while providing less and more shittier service. Do you think the recent Comcast Time Warner merger will cut your customer service waiting time or your cable bill in some way? Please!

Still, even that business model is more benign than the business model of financial services companies. After all no one forces you to have a phone or a cable. But we are all joined at the hip and taken for a ride, whether we want it or not, when it comes to SIFIs (Systemically Important Financial Institutions). Lefties, in the form of Krugman and Simon Johnson and the assortment of occupiers, have been talking about it for years. But it seems that some conservatives, with a knack for facts and simple analysis, begin to be troubled by such an unrestrained capitalism. What if capitalism collapses under its own weight, they wonder. Does that mean that, gasp, Karl Marx was right?