I don't think the socialists and free-market types will ever get along. We're not even on the same planet in terms of thinking.
Did this guy get paid money for this stuff? Where do I sign up?
Oh, BTW, the market was up 488.88 today...
Well then let me be the first:
"Markets always work better than governments!"
another economic review from the english department. What a dope.
Amen, brother!
I musta woken on the wrong planet.
That day was in 1944.
Like the invigoration centralization prompted in the Ukraine under Joe Stalin. Or the "Great Leap Forward" into the Dark Ages under Mao. Or Pol Pot's Garden of Skulls in Cambodia. Yep. "Salutary." Uh huh.
It will be a very long time before anyone can say with a straight face that markets always work better than governments.
On the contrary, I'll say it right now. Because for every Enron, there's an IRS. For every Global Crossing, there's a Department of Health and Human Services. And for every Ivan Boesky, there's a Robert Byrd. Markets always work better than governments.
But market fundamentalism has been so ascendant for so long -- politically, culturally, financially -- that this is only the very beginning of an ideological sea change.
Wishful thinking. If the drug-induced idealism of the 60's evolved into the greedfest of the 80's, there's nothing to prevent it happening again.
It remains to be seen whether liberals will manage to save capitalism from itself, for the second time in the past 70 years.
Liberalism can't even save liberalism. And capitalism doesn't need its help. Go back to Woodstock. You dropped your bag.
I must have been living in a time warp. I seem to remember eight years of Democratic (liberal) administration in there somewhere?
The "Liberals" did not save Capitalism in America in the 1930s anymore than the Socialists under Hitler saved Capitalism in Nazi Germany. Both the New Deal and the Nazis claimed to be heading off Communism, but that notion was (1) pure propaganda and (2) a complete denial of the facts that both the New Deal and National Socialism took their respective peoples a great deal further in the direction of Communist values than any alternative proposal--other than that of the actual Communists--for addressing the problems of the Great Depression.
The present melt-down in the economy is first a cyclical phenomenon. It is being aggravated because of a decline in public morality--I am not writing about sexual peccadillos, but about the widely accepted notion in Washington since at least 1930, and in the Corporate Board Rooms since Clinton became President, that it is perfectly all right to lie, so long as you are lying to achieve an end that you believe is useful or worthwhile. Cooked books is only one facet of this process.
This subjective rationalization for the lie has been particularly exemplified by activist Court decisions, which no one but an absolute moron believes reflect the intentions of the framers of our written Constitution; in the Theories of "A Living Constitution," prattled about in Academia--as also in the recent Al Gore campaign;--in the academic pretense that there is actually evidence of an equality of human potential--there is not, of course;--in Congressmen who promise all things to all people, and then pose for conflicting votes on the same issue, so that they may have something to cite to each group at election time.
The writer basically shows his Socialist bias, over and over again, in the above article. For example, his comment about American Health Care. The decline in the quality of American Health Care can be directly traced to the advent of Socialistic thinking with the launching of Medicare in 1965. His comments about personal income being subject to social concerns is pure Socialism. His suggestion that the Market cannot cope with the melt down better than Government, is pure demagoguery.
The obvious fact is this--and it will not change, however the clever rhetoric spinners on the Left obfuscate it in endless verbiage and repeated assertions of untruth: In trying times, the need for the participant in the economy--and that means employer and employee, farmer and shop keeper, manufacturer and consumer, salesman and supply house, mining company and exporter, etc., etc.--to rapidly respond to more fluid conditions, is far greater than in a period of fairly steady, long term expansion. In this situation, Government can only get in the way.
This does not mean that Government is unimportant. Legitimate American Government--Government which fulfills its Constitutional functions--can be very important in the picture. The role of Government is not to solve the problem of the individual. The idea that Government can centrally plan the dynamic interaction of 150,000,000 productive Americans better than they can direct their own activities in their own ethical self interest, is ludicrous. But a Government which provides stable money; stable measures; and deals with those who would interfere with the market's ability to adapt--all functions which the Founding Fathers envisioned--can do a lot to help the market to adjust to whatever it must adjust to. Government can also prosecute those who breach their fiduciary duties to their shareholders; making an example of those who would or have applied a Clintonesque morality to their discharge of private trusts. And Government can initiate an immigration policy which limits new arrivals, strictly to people who have jobs, and to people who have a cultural value system consistent with that of the men who founded America; a value system that understands that Government is not the answer--and never has been the answer to major economic dislocations.
We are in a cycle which will almost certainly cause a bearish bias in the market over the next couple of years, at least. That does not mean that the market need collapse. But it does mean that one can expect an end to the sort of bullish speculation, which drove Internet stocks into the Ionosphere. It is essential in these times that Conservatives understand how the Left operates; understand why the New Deal had so much Academic support; understand the inherent fallacies in their approach; understand that the Great Depression was lengthened by many years, because the "Liberal" recipe simply does not work.
In short, it is imperative that we go on the attack. Reacting to the enemy assault will not work. We--you and I--and all of the small band of politicians who have that increasingly rare combination of courage, insight and reason--must go on the offensive; we must see that the blame is put where the blame belongs.
America really is the issue, now. The Left will seek to hammer the last nails into the coffin. But if we prevail, the coffin will be for their despicable Socialist value system; for the success of the Big Lie, and the era of the charlatan and mountebank, with which they have infected us.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site