The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken
I suspect the bailout is a bad idea, on a variety of grounds...On the other hand, as distasteful as the bailout is, if (and that's a very, very, big if), as a practical matter (i.e., even if there are better alternatives, this is the best we are going to do in practice) the alternative is a complete meltdown of our financial system, friends of liberty are in a bind; the bailout is awful, but the current power grab by Washington is nothing compared to what we could expect if, say, commercial lending virtually ceased, and the stock markets fell an additional 50%. I suspect that this dynamic explains why opposition in the libertarian blogosphere is relatively muted; we bloggers don't know how big a threat there really is to our financial system, nor do we know whether, if the bailout fails, whatever winds up happening instead, including future legislative action, will actually be better.
David Bernstein
My thoughts: We continue to hear "the alternative is a complete meltdown of our financial system". Why? Where is the proof? Where is the evidence? The market is attempting to make much needed corrections and the government is trying to prevent it. If the root cause of the problem is government intervention in the economy (and it is) then why is the solution more government intervention? To quote Walter Williams, "we don't look to arsonists to put out fires that they've created; neither should we look to Congress to solve the problems they've created."
No comments:
Post a Comment