Posted on 10/15/2008 7:24:05 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
The Nobel committee can stop looking for next year's prize-winner in economics and hand the thing right now to Harold Myerson. The WaPo columnist's effort of today, Gods That Failed, is Krugmanesque, reading like an extended gloat at the expense of believers in free markets. Ha-ha, mocks Myerson, your god of unregulated capitalism is dead. Just like Communism failed, so has your system. You half-expect Myerson to end with a self-satisfied "nah nah nah nah nah!"
From Myerson's opening paras [emphasis added]:
In 1949, a number of famous writers, among them Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Richard Wright, Stephen Spender and Ignazio Silone, wrote essays explaining why they were no longer communists. The essays were collected in a volume entitled "The God That Failed."
Today, conservative intellectuals might want to consider writing a tome on the failure of their own beloved deity, unregulated capitalism.
There's just one small problem with Harold's hypothesis: it's based on an entirely false premise, one that I'm sure NB readers will quickly spot. The current mess was caused not by too little government regulation, but too much.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...
WaPo’s Myerson mocks the death of capitalism ping to Today show list.
This from a guy who is working for a DYING medium...print newspapers?! HA!
Yeah, capitalism is taking a bit of a hit, but I think it will make a comeback...if Constitutionalists will remember to stay strong during the coming storm of BHO’s Marxism.
Silly Myerson - unregulated capitalism would be alive and well if the government stopped trying to impose political correctness on financial markets!!!! Stick that in Barney Frank and smoke it!
This entire situation was caused by Federal manipulation of the mortgage market.
Somehow - rather doubt that the solution is to be found in expanded government.
How much was unregulated capitalism to blams for the Federal Reserve Board keeping interest rates below the inflation rate for the political goal of postponing recessions and instigating the real estate bubble?
Seems to me the incoming crowd has an irrational ideological bias against the free market and free enterprise and in favor of an all-powerful government. In other words they are socialists.
Not dead. Just taking a break while people insist on learning the hard way that socialism+ doesn’t work (”you told us how to do it, we didn’t listen, it didn’t work, so it’s your fault and we’ll do more of the same!”).
What these fools fail to understand is that it’s not unregulated capitalism that failed us but unregulated government. Our Checks and Balances system is what malfunctioned because Congress was sleeping with the Quasi-governmental agencies which they had oversight. Freddy and Fannie were exempt from SarbOx but the media wants to ignore that fact even as Franklin Raines, et all robbed us all blind.
When have we last had unregulated capitalism. 1909?
If Freddy and Fanny hadn’t been vacuuming up any and every crap mortgage that banks and brokers could slap a signature on, the housing prices would not have gotten so out of whack with true inflation. No interest loans, 50 year mortgages.
No housing bubble without the government creating the problem in the first place.
Wonder if Myerson is related to Herb Moses...is is possible that they are twins?
Thanks for posting. Great thread. Thanks to all posters.
“But, unfortunately, law by no means confines itself to its proper functions. And when it has exceeded its proper functions, it has not done so merely in some inconsequential and debatable matters. The law has gone further than this; it has acted in direct opposition to its own purpose. The law has been used to destroy its own objective: It has been applied to annihilating the justice that it was supposed to maintain; to limiting and destroying rights which its real purpose was to respect. The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others.”
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”
“Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.”
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”
“Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole — with their common aim of legal plunder — constitute socialism.”
The above quotes from “The Law” - Frederic Bastiat...here...
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G1798
Thanks to FReeper raygun for the link.
Never confuse capitalism with criminality/socialism.
Communism failed utterly and totally for 75 years. Among the typical results in the nations that adopted communism, which included countries on four continents, people of all races and various levels of economic well-being prior to their experiments were:
A. Starvation
B. Gulags, Secret Prisons
C. Mass Executions of political dissidents
D. Genocide directed against specific groups
E. Total survellience and no freedom of speech.
F. Smashing of traditional religion and morality
G. Massive environmental destructions (Chernoble)
H. Aggresssive War on peaceful neighbors.
I. General impoverishment and lack of consumer goods.
J. Lack of Creativity and end of most genuine art.
... and many other horrors large and small.
On the side of “unregulated capitalism” we have, instead, 100 years of virtually uniterrupted prosperity in nation after nation, culminatng in the current “failure” that includes massive prosperity, widespread ownership of real assetts by the citizens, including houses, securities, retirement funds, and consumer goods on a scale never before seen in the universe.
Oh, yeah. We are having to bail out a bunch of banks. All of which are part of a quasi-governmental monopoloy (The Fed system) and among the most highly regulated sectors of the economy. And so far this incident has had very moderate effects on anyone’s real life.
Our grocery stores are crammed full of food of every type (Roma tomatos $1 pound. Skippy Peanut Butter $2.59 ...)
To somehow compare the complete moral, political and economic faillure of Communism (as well documented in Koestlers “The God That Failed”) with this little glitch in our free market system is ABSURD.
Further it trivilizes the memory of both the unnamed victims of communism (1 million in little Cambodia alone) as well as the heroic sacrafices of conservative intellectuals, American and allied leaders, cold war spy agencies, and the western military organizations to confront and defeat the totalitarian menace.
NEVER FORGET!
Because they lie and equivocate: LIBERALS ARE IDIOTS AND LIARS.
Wow! I didn’t know about the SOX exclusion for Frddie and Fannie. Got a web link on that?
Dems are so slanted that they see "moderate-to-large" regulation as "no regulation" since they want "total regulation". What a goofus.
What’s needed is more regulation of Congress. They pile any garbage they want into a piece of legislation.
It was one of the videos kicking around of the Democrats and Republicans interviewing Freddy or Fanny honchos in 2004? and the Republican on the video mentioned that he thought about it later and realized that Sarbanes-Oxley didn’t even apply to Freddy and Fanny.
BTW: Who even said “Unregulated Capitalism” is the ideal of conservatives. Conservatives have always been mindful of the need to regulate within reason. The entire “unregulated” is a bogus slur, straw man and canard created by the leftists to smear Republicans.
For instance, re-read the great Conservative economist Fredrich Hayek’s masterpiece, The Road to Serfdom. He writes frequently about the legitimate role of government in regulating markets.
Bush never called for the end of financial regulation, indeed he signed many new financial regulations into law.
The whole line of argument is based on a false premise, as usual with Donkey polemics.
BTTT!
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