The economist Milton Friedman liked to point out that capitalism is a profit-and-loss system..... If the protesters want to fix the symbiosis between Wall Street and Washington, the first thing they need to do is recognize the disease. The disease is not too much capitalism but too little. If firms that fund bad investments by other firms lost all their money, they would either disappear or learn to be more prudent. Washington needs to be less involved with Wall Street, not more. We need less crony capitalism and more of the real thing. We need to demand of our politicians that they stop bailing out losers 100 cents on the dollar. If we keep subsidizing recklessness, we will keep getting more of it, and the rest of us will pay the price.
AM: Exactly. The real story of the financial crisis, the housing bubble, and the recession that is rarely heard in the mainstream media is that it was created by govenrment intervention in the economy, not by uncontrolled capitalism.
Where are the trolls today? They should be all over this..
ReplyDeleteI like the way Roberts puts it: the U.S. tax payer subsidizes recklessness; if you subsidize something, you get more of it. Pretty simple.
ReplyDeleteMaybe logic confounded the leftist trolls?
It's the perfect example of how governments' "good intentions" go so horribly wrong. The government can take credit for getting more people into homes, and then point the finger at Wall St when the bubble collapses. The tax payer got dinged twice here, first in the subsidization, then in the bail out.
ReplyDeleteThose who pay the piper call the tune?
ReplyDeleteNot 100 percent sure what that means, lots of people outside of "Wall Street" liked cheap mortgages.
ReplyDelete