The death of ReaganThatcherism is at hand. During the Argentine financial collapse (
and many others), the Argentinian government took measures to help its economy, and the US succeeded in pressuring them to reverse these measures. We scoffed at southeast Asia in the late 1990s, as governments there intervened in the financial crisis. Our story has been "We would never do anything like this, and look how well we're doing."
Now, the Bush administration is begging Congress for another $700 Billion (
a little over a trillion counting recent bailouts) for the mother of all government interventions, socialized banking. The free market fundamentalist vision of a market having nothing to do with government has been shattered forever, by its foremost advocates. George W Bush stepped to bat, essentially saying "My first instinct is to let the market fix things, but that's what got us into this recession in the first place".
The idea that a market free to do anything it pleases is a good thing, has been allowed to flow to its logical end, and virtually all politicians (
a group that doesn't like delivering bad news) say the sky is falling. We've learned that the market doesn't have the country's best interests at heart, when those diverge from the interests of the market itself, and the people who operate within it.
It's too bad Iraq is costing us trillions of dollars. If we hadn't been pouring
$1.8 Billion a week (
"top down") down the drain looking for WMD, a $700 Billion bailout might be a little more palatable for the American people.
