Tell It To The Hand

Are there any local free marketeers still standing?

If the total deregulation of the country's financial markets did not work 79 years ago, what would make people think that it would work today?

Ah, the glorious invisible hand of the free market. Through it, all things are fixed. Through it, everyone has a chance.

Libertarians: What went wrong? Over the last 30 years, the financial sector has been radically deregulated--and this is the result. This is your ideology in action.

Conservatives: "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Who said that? Wall Street's financial meltdown is the exact result of what Reagan preached. Our government stepped aside and let Wall Street do whatever it wanted to do. And now YOU are on the hook. Beautiful. Oh, and wouldn't it have been great if our Social Security program had been privatized like you folks wanted so badly? Just think about how much would be left for your retirement had all that money been invested in the stock market. What a fantastic idea.

“The secretary and the chairman of the Fed, two Bush appointees, came down here and said, ‘We’re from the government, we’re here to help them,’ ” Mr. Frank said. “I mean this is one more affirmation that the lack of regulation has caused serious problems. That the private market screwed itself up and they need the government to come help them unscrew it.”
--U. S. Rep. Barney Frank
...

"Roosevelt is dead," Limbaugh famously intoned at the appointment of GW Bush as President, "but his programs remain, and we're in the process of doing something about that, as well." Indeed.

Let's start calling this what it is - the total discrediting of the economic theories of Von Hayek, Milton and Thomas Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and borrow-and-spend Reaganomics/Bushnomics. The failure of "globalization," deregulation, and privatization. And let's begin to honestly identify today's events as a clear and clarion call for a return to the common-sense policies FDR put into place that saved capitalism from itself and its predators (and led to four decades of sustained growth of both the economy and the middle class) three generations earlier.

Thom Hartmann's article here.