by: Vin Suprynowicz
Last week, we were discussing the Obama administration’s anti-freedom agenda.
When a political leader snidely ridicules the free market, characterizing those who challenge his initiatives to vastly expand federal regulation and management of the economy as being in the pay of “greedy insurance executives,” “big bankers,” and the like, I don’t see how anyone can argue that he’s not against the free market.
In fact, they don’t. Mr. Obama’s champions respond by citing all the injustices which they believe are wrought by the free market.
Therefore, ipso facto and by their own words, their agenda is anti-freedom.
Their fall-back position appears to be, “OK, we acted like fascists, but it’s all temporary, and it had to be done or things would have gotten much worse.”
But the huge government economic interventions of the past three years – under Bush and Obama both – have done far more harm than good. Angela Merkel in Germany resisted calls for huge government “stimulus” spending on the Bush-Obama-McCain model. Left to their own devices, German employment and modest economic recovery are now doing better than ours.
Every Obama promise about how “stimulus” spending would limit unemployment and other signs of deepening recession has proven wrong. And who would expect otherwise? I doubt there’s been an administration in history whose members have so little cumulative experience running real, for-profit businesses in the free market. And who but a permanent prisoner of the ivory tower would expect any benefit for the private sector from a policy of government soaking up all the nation’s available credit and channeling it to “protect’ existing government bureaucrat jobs?
The leftists cackle that non-Democrats “offer no solution” except to “do nothing.”
Precisely. Faced with a serious depression in 1921 as the American economy corrected from its wartime footing, Warren G. Harding did little to fight the necessary deflation, instead slashing government expenditures while advising that the bankruptcy courts were there for those who needed them. Once it was obvious Washington was not going to step in to prop up wages or prices or anything else, the free market made its adjustments, and the correction of 1921 was over in 18 months, setting the stage for the boom of the 1920s.