The Gipper came to us with his sunny, phony, Hollywood style, pushing the common man but talking of unleashing the wonderful forces of the free market.
If only we could get the government off our backs, cut taxes and let the Magic of Capitalism roar about unfettered.
And it did. Republicans and Democrats alike joined in. Ronald Regan got rid of Paul Volker, the inflation hawk disciplinarian and picked instead Alan Greenspan, free market maven, utterer of the often incomprehensible statement and one-time devotee of Ayn Rand, the libertarian Big Sister.
Finance had a ball after Bill Clinton helped get rid of the Chinese walls between investment and commercial banking. Greenspan did his part to crank up markets while keeping rules at bay. Offshoring American jobs? Excellent, it’s just the way it goes. All boats rise, ya know. If Americans lose their jobs, it just the way it goes. It’s a New Economy, after all. Investments? Why not go after that alpha with your hedge fund. No, no don’t regulate. The people who created the funds and the derivatives who drive them are rocket scientists. Twenty-something federal regulators can’t even understand what they’re talking about. Securitize bad mrotgages. No problemo!
And, despite what you’ll read on Bacon’s rebellion today (if you can understand MassOverconsumption and all the other cute, but innane definitions), you may forget that a lot of the columnists and readers are right-wing conservatives who partied on, Wayne, right with the Reaganites. If you ever wanted to read a mantra of free market mumbo-jumbo, BR is the place to do it. Instead of little busts of Lenin, these people ought to have little Gippers on their desks.
Now comes Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on today’s Huffington Post:
“The globalization agenda has been closely linked with the
market fundamentalists — the ideology of free markets and
financial liberalization. In this crisis, we see the most
market-oriented institutions in the most market-oriented
economy failing and running to the government for help.
Everyone in the world will now say this is the end of market
fundamentalism. In this sense, the fall of Wall Street is
for market fundamentalists what the fall of the Berlin Wall
was for communism — it tells the world that this way of
economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the
end, everyone says, that model doesn’t work. This moment is a
marker that the claims of financial market liberalization
were bogus.”
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Peter Galuszka