The Invisible Hand

A followup thought on the whole Bear Sterns/Federal Reserve/JP Morgan Chase story... allowing these companies to go under would hurt Wall Street-- which is happening anyway-- but would technically be allowing the risk factor of capitalism to take its natural course. Isn't capitalism supposed to be darwinistic and unfair, as we've been told so often? But Republicans don't actually believe in capitalism; they believe in corporatism. To them, these businesses are more important than people, the latter of whom are told simply to suck it up. It's a mentality that privatizes the gains of a working economy, and socializes the costs when things go bust.

It's very amusing to me to watch these conservatives freak out over liberal ideas big (universal health care) to small (regulation) to very small (a minimum wage hike) as if the economy itself will crumble at the mere discussion of such things, but then defend a government which is working overtime to keep failing Fortune 500 companies afloat with unprecedented market tinkering. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to make do with a $600 stimulus check that the government believes will actually help, because apparently it's 1960 and that money means more than it does.

Weak dollar, low job growth, outsourcing, cost of living increases that are impossible to catch up... these are things that the President will not acknowledge, and-- maybe with the exception of the first one-- are not things that most conservatives believe to be a problem at all.

CNBC's Larry Kudlow (who's been playing the role of official corporate apologist for months now) said Sunday night in a post at the National Review insists that "Bush was right to put on an optimistic face on Friday" and that Democrats are the ones who are "emulating" Herbert Hoover here by... urging a renegotiation of NAFTA (which has what to do with all this anyway)? Not the quality spin I expect from a guy who wrote the foreword to the book, "The Bush Boom: How A 'Misunderestimated' President Fixed Our Broken Economy".

It's understandable why-- like every other disaster of this presidency-- they'd try to blame the other side for causing it with their evil thoughts, but this is the hubris of conservative economics meeting its end. It's the savings and loan debacle, it's Enron. The religion of deregulation and laissez-faire capitalism, the creation of a housing bubble that everyone knew would collapse but not before President Bush could brag about an "ownership society" at the 2004 convention, the idea that in free-market capitalism the only people who ever have to suffer the consequences of failure are the average Joes... all these policies (which, yes, did begin in the latter half of the '90s, then went on steroids when the Bushies came in) have helped make this possible.

As for those weenies in 'Old Europe'? Guess what... they're #1. God bless America.