Regulation is for your protection

Created
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 00:00
Updated
Sat, 18/03/2023 - 00:00
Techies should know that. Should. Believe it or not, a pair of tweets about last Friday’s collapse of Silicon Valley Bank are still current. Eugene Robinson writes about those conditionalities this morning: Question: What is a socialist? Answer: A libertarian tech bro who had money in Silicon Valley Bank. There is nothing funny about the second-biggest bank failure in the nation’s history, which has roiled financial markets at a time when the economy is already unsettled. It is richly ironic, though, to hear luminaries of the tech sector, after years of complaining that “big government” was the problem, suddenly clamoring for massive federal intervention and largesse. I’m talking about people such as David Sacks, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who is a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, a group of founders and early employees that includes bombastic anti-government billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. On Twitter, Sacks has railed against “profligate spending and money printing coming out of Washington” and the evils of what he calls “Bidenomics.” But on Friday, Sacks was frantically calling for big government to come to the rescue of Silicon Valley Bank. He tweeted: “Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. Place SVB with a Top 4 bank. Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.” If Veruca Salt worked in Silicon Valley. All that libertarian tech bro “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Startup” is bullshit when the shit hits the fan, isn’t…