“In the market every profession is a helping profession,” says one libertarian.

Not true. There is a huge market for snuff movies. 

No one would suggest that this kind of “helping” is “better” than the work of many bare-foot doctors who bring help to villages for a pittance, since that is all their patients can pay.  Those are extremes, of course.  There are certainly non-profits that are simply sinecures.

But the idea that an excess of materialism had no part to play in the financial crisis, as some argue, is simply laughable.

The problem is the opposite.

Supposedly charitable/non-profit outfits and professions that used to adhere to standards of professional conduct have succumbed to the mentality of the state-capitalists, producing nothing, wanting perks, privileges, and subsidies, and adhering to no market discipline of any kind or to any ethical standards of any kind either. 

In a society with self-restraint, the laws work and the markets produce prosperity.

Without virtue (and virtu), the laws become instruments of plunder, and you get criminality. The law itself becomes criminal.

But as long as people think ideologically, and determine blame by ideology, things will continue along the same path.

My money is on OccupyWallStreet….at least, so far.