Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Liberal mistakes "government" for "Reagan and free-market conservatives"
I'm not sure whether this person lived through the same 40+ years I just did. And certainly none of the symptoms she's describing are the aims of "free-market conservatives". Mostly government doing what it does best.
It's a legitimate concern that we've become corporatist, in fact the subsidization, failure and rescue of the GSE's is corporatist behavior. But who, may I ask, has been most critical about them over the years? Corporatism is a shamefully bipartisan pastime.
And it would be nice if we actually, you know, experimented with free-markets and deregulation. Carter started airline deregulation, and that's been pretty good for consumers (although Airlines haven't made a cent since). Telecom deregulation eliminated a whole slice of the home budget, and burned some big piles of corporate capital in the ensuing competition. Anybody remember what it cost to call California in 1975?
The mortgage market, however, remains a festering mix of subsidized competition and securitization and ill-considered regulations promoting 'community reinvestment' and outlawing reasonable underwriting rules. DGMW, Greed and animal spirits are the primary cause of the subprime debacle, but don't ever think government is clean on that score, and in a remarkably bipartisan way.
2 Comments:
By 
Steve M. Galbraith, at
Wed Aug 13, 06:17:00 PM:
Hmm, the old Whig interpretation of history (so to speak). Progressives fighting the good fight against the reactionary, corrupt Conservatives.
Nah, I'm not buying it.
Anyone (to pick something from the air) who has read a history of, say, the Civil War, recognizes that war profiteering and corruption didn't somehow spring fullblown from Reagan's brow.
Just read "The Education of Henry Adams" to get a small sense of it.
Among other lessons about Washington.
['Course, Lincoln was a Republican]
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Thu Aug 14, 10:18:00 PM:
Part of what makes the market work is that fear counterbalances greed. When governments protect their pals and remove their fear, greed is the inevitable result.
The free market is not the way (conservatives and) libertarians want the world to work, it is the way the world does work. You can call fitting in with that a Zen thing if it makes you feel better.
