For those of you who think that capitalism is dead, doesn’t work, or should be abolished or severely regulated, consider this letter by Steven Horwitz, Economics Professor at St. Lawrence University.
Thomas Sowell also writes here about getting the facts straight, and pointing out a clear connection between a “greedy” CEO and Barack Obama.
Samples from Sowell:
Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.
Samples for Horwitz:
To call the housing and credit crisis a failure of the free market or the product of unregulated greed is to overlook the myriad government regulations, policies, and political pronouncements that have both reduced the “freedom” of this market and channeled self-interest in ways that have produced disastrous consequences, both intended and unintended.
The current mess is thus clearly shot through and through with government meddling with free markets, from the Fed-provided fuel to the CRA and land-use regulations to Fannie and Freddie creating an artificial market for risky mortgages in order to meet Congress’s demands for more home-ownership opportunities for low-income families. Thanks to that intervention, many of those families have not only lost their homes, but also the savings they could have held onto for a few more years and perhaps used to acquire a less risky mortgage on a cheaper house. All of these interventions into the market created the incentive and the means for banks to profit by originating loans that never would have taken place in a genuinely free market.
Those of us who support free markets are not your enemies right now. The real problem here is the marriage of corporate and state power. That is the corporatism we both oppose. I ask of you only that you consider whether such corporatism isn’t the real cause of this mess and that therefore you reconsider whether free markets are the cause and whether increased regulation is the solution.
By the way, the marriage of corporate and State power is a fundamental characteristic of fascism. And for the record, all parties and recent presidents are to blame for this debacle. This is what “compassionate conservatism” and “bleeding hearts” get us when we “regulate for the common good.” Regulation is good, but only when it protects us and does not “rig the system” for corporations, or for anybody else for that matter.
