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To: JasonC

You’ve turned your own argument on its head.

It is the government who is moving money to the “buggy whip manufactures” and their unions right NOW and taking it from the companies and individuals that the market is rewarding for their innovation. Government is choosing the winners and losers against the market. That makes us all a little poorer and the longer it goes on the more we lose.


53 posted on 02/02/2010 3:24:15 PM PST by DB
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To: DB
The market decided it wouldn't trust capital to any bank in the country even at rates of 15%. At the same moment, T-bill auctions at *zero* were four times oversubscribed. Your silly superficial ideology cannot deal with the patent facts of the financial panic. Private capital *ran for the hills*. The business community itself handed all of its capital to Washington and said "here, do something with it, we sure as heck don't trust all the deadbeats we've been lending to for the last decade".

You do not need to like this for it to be true.

Yes in the long run it is better for private enterprise to allocate capital. But somebody is going to take the risks necessary to get the economy moving, and if they won't, then the feds will.

The deficit plus active monetary ease (entirely temporary on the latter score, BTW, and over in October of 2008) allowed every other actor in the system to reduce their credit risks and their leverage. Enough so that risk appetites have returned.

It is entirely normal that the government supports financial markets at the bottom of the cycle. It always has, always. Back to the dawn of financial capitalism in Holland in the 1600s.

None of that is wrecked. Does that mean we needed the stimulus package, no. Health care giveaways, certainly not. Energy taxes, not at all. Higher taxes generally, not wanted. But keeping the banks open, letting tax receipts fall well below spending, and active monetary policy were all required and entirely called for.

Stop attacking the effective instruments of the American state and start making distinctions where they are actually needed, between actions that do not help and those that have. You will find, if you ever bother to look, that the working ones have all been advocated by expert professionals and were seconded by the Bush administration, and they have in common - not a whiff of populism. While all the crap added since has in common - hatred of finance and the rich, and an attempt to punish it, to benefit main street *deadbeats* who are the ones who actually welshed.

68 posted on 02/02/2010 8:37:45 PM PST by JasonC
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