Ya’ll like you some free markets? Well, sorry, a free market system has never actually existed in this country. Remember in high school economics class when they’d use quaint examples like a row of banana vendors on a street to explain pure competition? Yeah, turns out being small, localized, extremely specific and completely isolated is the only way to actually pull that off. Banana street, and perhaps that old section of Craigslist devoted to prostitution (everything was $50, classic competition curve) is basically as far as that illustration goes. I have this funny sensation that portraying the accurate, real-world scope of the economic model for pure competition like it’s some dumbed-down, arbitrary version of the idea is overt propaganda.
    
So what we end up with instead is an indirect relationship between markets and the government. A fair definition of our entire party system ends up being how optimistic or pessimistic one is, not about the relationship itself — that would be delusional! — but about their roles in a well-established interdependence.
    
The recent Occupy Wall Street movements (which last happened in the ’70s for similar, less dramatic reasons) gather around the most recent and appropriately controversial symptom of the deliberately censored relationship between industry and government: the bailouts. All of those huge government bailouts of private corporations (banking, auto, etc.) rightly gave credence to the idea that “private” isn’t the most accurate term to describe these institutions.
    
Banks and the economic ideas behind them have grown proportionally with the scale, ambition and overall culture of the Western world — this illustration is necessary to introduce the need for humongous reserves of credit for the public and private sectors. Though not alone, banks end up really skewing the whole idea of public vs. private because the banks themselves influence the economy in huge and unpredictable ways by generating previously non-existent credit at unknown rates. Hear me out.
    
So here’s one way to look at the problem with our system that has so many people currently feeling left out in the cold. Banks, like all private industry, want to and are perceived as proudly private. This is the essence of our political paradigm, after all, the assumption most people carry around with them as they live out their myopic, pleasant existence: that business and government are forever at war with each other, the former nobly resisting and denouncing the influence and regulation of the latter. The private banks, not the government, are the guys who have free reign over our money; we already pay taxes, why should we let the government look after our money when we can be real Americans and give it to a bank that’ll provide us with competitive services and interest rates?
    
Banks look and smell on the surface like they’re independent, private and simply provide financial services for other people’s money, but even a passing glance at reality (which can be difficult) tells us so differently that you’ll immediately regret even looking. Think about the footage we’ve all seen of the mint printing stacks and stacks of money. Now be tormented with the regrettable knowledge that government created money accounts for around 5 percent of all the money in circulation. Read my words: Over 95 percent of all the money in existence right now was created by banks as a direct result of some schlub signing a pledge of indebtedness.
    
Now, you might disapprove of reality being a stupid, weird one and not one that makes any sense, so I apologize in advance. The interdependence of government and the banking system is absurdly symbiotic. Government enforces the fairly recently-established fiat currency that enables banks to debt you with money that amounts to as many photons as your eyeballs process when you look at the numbers on the ATM. The government enforces bank debts, though seeing as there would be no money if there was no debt because credit and debt are one in the same, not enforcing bank debts would be like not enforcing its own currency. If everyone — the government, corporations and all American families — were magically forgiven of all their debt by every bank, there would be no money left even though the amount of physical dollars would not change.
    
Banks aren’t just another industry: They are the gatekeepers and proprietors of the vast majority of our entire economy. It makes perfect sense that the government would subsidize them at the drop of a hat. What OWS protesters should be protesting is the deception and lack of definition regarding the political relationships in this country — the private and public sectors’ very existence is hopelessly, chronically interdependent to the point where our entire monetary system will collapse without it. The economy has been thrown in a blender and there’s no way to go back — so what’s the use of these strong political identities if they only suppress obvious and immediate truths? Oh right, it’s the only thing keeping us from dissolving into a one-party system.

— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.