E. J. Dionne Jr. has been one of my favorites for a while but I've always suspected that he's holding back how he really feels...
Today...he lets it loose.
You can read the whole article here but I've just GOT to post some snippets:
Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
snip:
The Wall Street titans have turned into a bunch of welfare clients. They are desperate to be bailed out by government from their own incompetence, and from the deregulatory regime for which they lobbied so hard. They have lost "confidence" in each other, you see, because none of these oh-so-wise captains of the universe have any idea what kinds of devalued securities sit in one another's portfolios.
snip
But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the past three decades or so, nothing will.
snip
As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted of the era leading up to the Depression, "The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great -- a little understood thing."
snip
But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary, and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.
Wow......
I don't think I've ever seen a clearer example of the paradox of Conservative thinking....public sector intervention is okay in order to bail out the "captains of industry"....in order to literally save capitalism from it's own excesses.
Conservatives seem to have a problem in learning the lessons of history. In a way, I think, they are too much in love with the myth of "the invisible hand" and the "free market", neither of which have ever existed in any true sense, to see the reality of the dangers of unchecked capitalism. Perhaps I should be more precise by stating that what we witnessed in 1929 1981 and 2001 was capitalism running rampant.
It's examples like these that make me think that the image we liberal/progressives usually paint of conservatives as being....well....dumb....are founded in no small part by history.
sigh..............................
