As the banking economy accelerates into high gear thanks to the trillions of taxpayer dollars handed over without actual taxpayers having a say in the matter, executives in the industry are once again paying billions in bonuses and proceeding with business as usual. Not only has economic amnesia taken hold of the bankers and allowed them to forget the near-collapse they caused, but they have fought tooth and nail against any sort of meaningful reform to their destructive system. And as sure as the sun rises in the east, before long they will be clamoring for more deregulation of the sort that created the mess in the first place.

Neo-liberal economists—the ones who saddled us with the deregulatory framework under which we currently suffer—don’t like to talk about morality. They don’t like to be told that their mathematics needs real world justification. When asked to justify their views morally, they answer vaguely that deregulation is good for everyone. Asked for specifics, the best they can come up with is that deregulation makes it easy to for corporations accumulate mountains of money, and some of that money will filter to the masses.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the unemployment rate for working people continues to creep upward as financial sector profits break records. If we toss aside the doctored government numbers for a moment and use the U-6 index, we find a figure of 17%—more than 1 out of 6 Americans are unemployed or underemployed. If we look at overall income distribution, we see that the rich have profited handsomely during the neo-liberal years, while the American worker has gained little. This is starkly illustrated by the fact that between 1990 and 2000 modest rises in worker pay were cancelled out by inflation, while corporate profits rose 93% and CEO pay rose 571%. In short—all the money being made is filtering nowhere, except perhaps into the secret offshore bank accounts of the rich.

The bankers and business elites who made fortunes as a result of deregulation pretend to be oblivious to economic disparities, when the truth is they simply don’t possess enough morals to care. Recently, the vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs in Britain, Lord Brian Griffiths, said during an address to an audience at St Paul’s Cathedral that the public should not be concerned with the growing wealth gap. The public, he said, should “tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity for all.” So in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, this is the form the bankers’ lies take: inequality is a means to prosperity.

But Lord Griffiths didn’t stop there. He went on to say that capping bonuses might cause the banks to relocate to other countries. In the genteel upper crust circles in which Griffiths runs, this qualifies as a naked threat. The irony comes when we learn that his speech was supposed be about morality in the marketplace. And indeed, his morals are simple—born rich, privileged and landed, he thinks any sort of regulation that might bring the OK Corral financial system under control is a bad idea. Never mind that the rest of us are regulated in every aspect of our lives. We are not trusted not to mug an old lady, or rob a cash machine—laws tell us we will be punished. But bankers’ unethical actions harm more than one old lady. Their misdeeds can—and have—hurt billions of people, yet they expect to operate above the law. And if we don’t allow it, well then, they will take our jobs away.

Since the dawn of the neo-liberal deregulatory movement, progressive attacks have gotten mired in the math. But to argue on neo-liberal terms is simply playing on a field they built. It becomes about whether our math can produce greater theoretical profits than their math, and that’s a losing proposition when their math absurdly suggests every form of regulation is bad. Protect workers? No, neo-liberalism is better because it produces more profit by not protecting workers, and that helps everyone in the end. Protect the environment? No, neo-liberalism is better because it produces more profit by not protecting the Earth, and that helps everyone in the end. You see how it works? Add to this the problem that laymen—especially progressive politicians—are intimidated by neo-liberal math. When an economist tells a legislator something is true, he or she accepts it unquestioningly. And when the math inevitably fails in the real world, the neo-liberal economist says it’s because some impurity has contaminated the equation. Since these impurities always take the form of regulations, failure becomes the basis for yet more deregulation. Pretty neat trick.

Instead of being intimidated by equations, progressives need to question the moral grounds neo-liberals have for their beliefs. This approach might seem to invite scorn, but in the same way you don’t need a driver’s license to question a reckless driver’s wishes to do 120 on the freeway, you don’t need an economics degree to question a banker’s desire to do 120 through our financial system. The issue isn’t whether the speeding driver can get there faster—it’s whether he has the right to run other drivers off the road. Likewise, the issue of whether the banker can make more money is immaterial. We can prove the money goes nowhere but to the rich. So the final question becomes simply: “By what justification do you get to operate without laws, when the rest of us do not have that right?”

Believe it or not, neo-liberals have an answer to this question, but it isn’t one they will usually say out loud. So I’ll say it for them—their moral basis for being allowed to operate without laws is that they are better than us. More than they believe in the church of the market and the God that is money, they believe this. And even when they prove, over and over, that their morals are actually worse than those of the lowly masses, they continue to push their mythology of deregulation, with its underlying implication that they are pure enough to run without leashes.

Both history and recent events have proven, however, that not only aren’t the bankers pure enough to be trusted off their leashes—they aren’t even housebroken. The trillion dollar mess on the carpet we cleaned up for them is proof of that. But since they’re so enamored with the idea of freedom, let’s try a counterproposal. We’ll let the neo-liberal bankers and businessmen run free if they give up their alarm systems and doormen, and abolish the private shoot-to-kill police forces that patrol their isolated, electrically fenced communities. And once they’re as vulnerable as the rest of us, we’ll make a promise to each other. They’ll promise to operate without rules while adhering to the highest possible moral standards, and we’ll promise that if they wreck the system again, nobody will harm a hair on their heads. As promises go, both are equally empty.