Great Klein Post on the "Free Market" Bush Administration
I am still in the Dark Ages (an anti-Church misnomer) when it comes to reading blogs. My wife once tried to set up a Bloglines thingie for the sites I like, but it didn’t take. So that means I only read a limited number of blogs during a normal session. Consequently, I only read Peter Klein’s blog posts when they get linked from another site. Perhaps it’s just selection bias, but man Klein always knocks it out of the park… Check out Klein on journalists (HT2 Steve Horwitz):
Bush and Paulson and Greenspan and their clique are “free marketeers” in the same way (to borrow from A. J. Jacobs) that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. They adopt the language, and some of the form, of market advocacy without any of the content. The Bush Administration was already, before the “financial crisis,” the most economically interventionist since LBJ; it now ranks with Hoover and FDR as the most aggressively anti-market in US history. Greenspan and Bernanke expanded the money supply like none before; Bush and Cheney borrowed and spent trillions to finance overseas adventures; the Federal Register added pages at a record-setting pace; now the banking and automobile industries have become GSEs. Lassiez-faire, indeed!…
And yet, there was Juan Williams on yesterday’s Diane Rehm show explaining, matter-of-factly, how Bush and Paulson had allowed their “free-market ideology” and “resistance to regulation” to “commitment to the idea that the market works itself” to lead the nation into ruin. Williams may be a good news reporter, but he has the political-economy understanding of a fifth-grader. Does it ever occur to these “watchdogs” to investigate what government officials actually do, rather than simply repeat what they say?
Fight the power, Pete!
