An excuse for cracking down

Newsweek has an interview with George Soros, the billionaire who tends to fund progressive causes and is thus reviled by the rest of the 1%. Soros looks at the state of the world economy and is really worried -- and this from a guy who made his money betting against rising markets. A couple quotes from the article:

To Soros, the spectacular debunking of the credo of efficient markets—the notion that markets are rational and can regulate themselves to avert disaster—“is comparable to the collapse of Marxism as a political system. The prevailing interpretation has turned out to be very misleading. It assumes perfect knowledge, which is very far removed from reality. We need to move from the Age of Reason to the Age of Fallibility in order to have a proper understanding of the problems.”

Understanding, he says, is key. “Unrestrained competition can drive people into actions that they would otherwise regret. The tragedy of our current situation is the unintended consequence of imperfect understanding. A lot of the evil in the world is actually not intentional. A lot of people in the financial system did a lot of damage without intending to.”

And later…

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

I would add to the last point how easy it would be, with the Occupy encampments in many cities, for authorities to provoke a riot (as what happened in Oakland) or to pretend an encampment is ripe for a riot as an excuse to crack down.