Well this didn't take long. (page 2)

Caedes

Perhaps those Bankers should have tried to run the system fairly and effectively, instead their own greed and short-sightedness has led them to this point.

Perhaps Montgomery can suggest an alternative since self regulation was such a catastrophic fubar in the banking system? Or is this just another right wing reactionary railing against Obama?

Robdar

"We told the Asians that they had to be willing to let banks and companies fail," said Jeffrey Garten, a professor at the Yale School of Management and a top official in the Clinton administration. "We warned that there was great moral hazard if governments just bailed them out."
"And now," he said, "we are doing the polar opposite of our advice."

Let them fail.

BurnTheShips

If you've never read Bob Higgs's brilliant Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford, 1987), you're missing one of the great social-science books of our time. Higgs demonstrates, in meticulous detail, how the growth of the American state in the twentieth century has followed a regular pattern: a national or international "crisis," real or imagined, followed by a massive slate of new government programs supposedly designed to alleviate the crisis, programs that are never eliminated or even scaled back after the alleged crisis has abated. The nature of government is to grow, but its growth is normally constrained by public opinion. Government takes advantage of -- and sometimes manufactures -- "crisis" situations in which those constraints can be lifted. A critical ingredient is fear: state functionaries and their allies in academia and the media work hard to create a climate of panic among the public, a sense that only the state can avert a grave calamity.

I agree with Thom Lambert and Steve Horwitz that Obama's "stimulus" package is another example of the Higgs effect. Just as the Bush Administration and its house intellectuals seized the opportunity of the 9/11 attacks to stoke public fear of terrorism, all to bully opponents into supporting its "War on Terror," both the Bush and Obama Administrations have taken advantage of the recession (and the much needed credit-market correction) to stoke public fear of a global economic collapse, all to bully opponents into supporting a major expansion of the state. Just as the USA Patriot Act had little to do with national security, the proposed stimulus package has little to do with economic stimulus. People like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong have long wished for a massive increase in government spending, the nationalization of credit markets, czars for each major industry, and the like; now they have their justification. Let's not confuse the issue by pretending that the current debate has much to do with the economy itself.

http://blog.mises.org/archives/009321.asp

Farkel

:What exactly does your thread title mean Burn??

Communism. I've been saying that all along. Be careful what you wish for.

Liberals, socialists, communists, marxists (distinctions without a difference) like to focus on dealing with pain, big pain faced by a relatively small group, such as the banks and two auto manufacturers are now facing. There solution is to take that big pain suffered by a very few and spread that pain around to many, many innocent people who had nothing to do with causing that pain. When the Government robs from Peter to pay Paul, he can always be counted on the support of Paul and Peter, though innocent gets the pain.

When Obama flippantly stated during the campaign that he "wanted to spread the wealth around," he was talking like the Communist that he is.

As I said, be careful what you wish for. You may get it.

Farkel

beksbks

Oh Farkel, you just broke my heart. I had developed such a crush on you.

BurnTheShips

What is on the table in Washington today simply has nothing to do with any serious economic thinking...... there is precious little economic evidence for the benefits of large fiscal policy initiatives. What these are really about is enacting programs and policies that people like them have wanted for years on their own supposed merits, independent of any "stimulus." The crisis is just the reason to carpe diem. So rather than a debate over the merits of particular programs, we get the language of crisis and fear thrown at us so that we'll swallow them all, whole hog, with little debate. Accusing your opponents of being "ethics-free Republican hacks" and refusing to examine the actual evidence of the Hoover and FDR years means you don't have to argue for the merits of the individual pieces, just scare the public and demonize the opposition. Of course, that's exactly what these same folks complained about after 9/11. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss indeed.