Economic Warfare

[Norfolk]

Hedge funds are not criminal under our system of laws, no matter how much harm they cause. When they collapse companies or even nations, they are considered agents of the "invisible hand" (Adam Smith) spurring "creative destruction" (Joseph Schumpeter) in the interest of greater economic efficiency.

As we perhaps approach "regime change" (in the economic sense), the rules might change -- as the folks making the rules change. Creditors make the rules, probably over time becoming Asian (in a broad sense) and Middle Eastern elites. They might have different views of speculators, and enforce them.

On the other hand, history shows many instances of societies at first condemning weapons, then adopting them. Like the crossbow and strategic bombing. Perhaps other nations will adopt our methods of (in their eyes) economic warfare, but now wielded by the State (not investors) for national (not private) ends.

Whether our laws formally codify the gravely harmful actions of Hedge Funds and the like as criminal or not, they are not the less criminal for lack of it. Slavery was not legally defined as a crime in much of the U.S. until the end of the Civil War, but it was not less any less criminal. Crime is not unlike pornography, you may not be able to define it, but you know it when you see it. The victims of the Asian Currency Crisis would not disagree that they had been the victims of a crime.

"Crimes Against Humanity" did not exist in any body of law when War Criminals were tried for such crimes at Nuremberg. "Crimes Against Humanity" was a legal term invented for the Trials; but what the War Criminals did were not less crimes by virtue of the absene of any such legal codification of such actions as formal crimes at the time that they were committed.

The actions of Hedge Funds and their kind, when they result in grave harm without deliberate malice towards societies, are not less crimes for the lack of a legal definition somewhere that they are such.