Lucille
10-05-2008, 09:59 AM
What Now? Controlling the Narrative (http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2008/10/what-now-contro.html)
It is imperative that we continue to point out that this crisis was caused by a whole host of government interventions, from the Fed to the GSEs to the CRA to land-use regulations and so on. We need to constantly argue that this was not the result of "free markets" or "deregulation." It's also worth noting that the one bit of deregulation that did take place in recent years (the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall) has been key to avoiding a worse disaster by allowing commercial banks to buy up investment banks and allowing the struggling investment banks to go commercial to keep themselves afloat. If this bailout becomes the disaster that many of us believe it will be, we need to make sure we pin the blame where it belongs.
What we want to avoid, I would argue, is a repeat of what is now the conventional narrative of the Great Depression: It was capitalism that caused the crash, it was Hoover's inaction that turned it into a Great Depression, and it was FDR's interventions that saved us. As we now know, that's wrong on all three counts, particularly on the issue of Hoover's inaction. He was quite the interventionist and those programs, picked up later by FDR, made matters much worse. The analogy to the current situation is pretty striking.
[...]
One final thought: if one really believes this bailout will make matters worse, especially significantly worse, I think it's a reason to vote/root for Obama. Should McCain win and things go downhill, it will be much easier to blame the mess on "free markets" and "deregulation," not because McCain believes those things but because of GOP lip-service to them and the perception that they've acted on that lip-service. With Obama in office, and things going south, it might be more akin to the late 70s under Carter, where the blame is less likely to be laid at the feet of markets. I might be wrong about this, but given the disastrous combination of free market "talk" but statist action by the GOP, I think I'd rather have the folks who don't even talk the talk at the helm when the waters get very choppy.
Thomas Knapp (http://knappster.blogspot.com/2008/10/next.html) isn't quite that optimistic:
If McCain won the election, he and Palin might finally kill off their party for good and leave the field open to a real pro-market, pro-freedom opposition party (assuming one can be put together -- I'm trying, folks, I'm trying).
Obama, on the other hand, may very well be the next FDR with all that that entails ... and his presidency will either destroy the Republican Party as surely as a McCain/Palin presidency would, or else give GOP leisure to refurbish the useful myth that they're something other than the party of big government they are and always have been.
From where I sit, the biggest problem is that the liberal MSM controls the narrative.
It is imperative that we continue to point out that this crisis was caused by a whole host of government interventions, from the Fed to the GSEs to the CRA to land-use regulations and so on. We need to constantly argue that this was not the result of "free markets" or "deregulation." It's also worth noting that the one bit of deregulation that did take place in recent years (the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall) has been key to avoiding a worse disaster by allowing commercial banks to buy up investment banks and allowing the struggling investment banks to go commercial to keep themselves afloat. If this bailout becomes the disaster that many of us believe it will be, we need to make sure we pin the blame where it belongs.
What we want to avoid, I would argue, is a repeat of what is now the conventional narrative of the Great Depression: It was capitalism that caused the crash, it was Hoover's inaction that turned it into a Great Depression, and it was FDR's interventions that saved us. As we now know, that's wrong on all three counts, particularly on the issue of Hoover's inaction. He was quite the interventionist and those programs, picked up later by FDR, made matters much worse. The analogy to the current situation is pretty striking.
[...]
One final thought: if one really believes this bailout will make matters worse, especially significantly worse, I think it's a reason to vote/root for Obama. Should McCain win and things go downhill, it will be much easier to blame the mess on "free markets" and "deregulation," not because McCain believes those things but because of GOP lip-service to them and the perception that they've acted on that lip-service. With Obama in office, and things going south, it might be more akin to the late 70s under Carter, where the blame is less likely to be laid at the feet of markets. I might be wrong about this, but given the disastrous combination of free market "talk" but statist action by the GOP, I think I'd rather have the folks who don't even talk the talk at the helm when the waters get very choppy.
Thomas Knapp (http://knappster.blogspot.com/2008/10/next.html) isn't quite that optimistic:
If McCain won the election, he and Palin might finally kill off their party for good and leave the field open to a real pro-market, pro-freedom opposition party (assuming one can be put together -- I'm trying, folks, I'm trying).
Obama, on the other hand, may very well be the next FDR with all that that entails ... and his presidency will either destroy the Republican Party as surely as a McCain/Palin presidency would, or else give GOP leisure to refurbish the useful myth that they're something other than the party of big government they are and always have been.
From where I sit, the biggest problem is that the liberal MSM controls the narrative.