'There's no central exchange'
Although excoriated by both neoliberalism and neoconservativism, the concept of the Nanny State continues to haunt capitalist realism. The specter of big government plays an essential libidinal function for capitalist realism. It is there to be blamed precisely for its failure to act as a centralizing power, the anger directed at it much like the fury Thomas Hardy supposedly spat at God for not existing. 'Time and again', James Meek observed in an LRB piece on water privatization in Britain, 'Conservative and Labor governments have discovered that when they give powers to private companies, and those private companies screw up, voters blame the government for giving the powers away, rather than the companies for misusing them'. Meek was visiting Tewkesbury, one of the British towns that was the victim of serious flooding in 2007, a year after the disaster. On the face of it, the flooding and the consequent failure of services was the fault of privatized water companies and house builders, yet Meek found that this was not the way that most of the local residents saw it. 'In Tewkesbury', Meeks wrote,
in general there is more hostility towards the government, the council and the Environment Agency for not stopping house builders than there is towards house builders for building houses, or buyers for buying them. When insurers raise their premiums, more blame is directed at the government for not spending enough on flood defences than at insurers for raising the premiums, or at people who choose to live in a flood-prone valley but don't like paying extra for it.
Capitalist Realism
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