The Economy as a Cocaine Addiction

I think we can all admit that while the boys at Reason are good on SWAT excesses and legalizing the devil weed, their, uh, libertarian economics leaves a lot to be desired. A miasma of hands-off, "market economy" platitudes, it confuses corporate state capitalism with the free exchange of goods and labor as surely as MSNBC confuses the Dow with "the economy." This leads to some curious analytical exercises, such as this WaPo op-ed in which Welch and Gillespie argue rightly that Barack Obama is a spendthrift who has aped his immediate predecessor in creating a state of incessant national crisis to justify a series of hastily constructed, ill-considered emergency measures, even as they yearn, like a pair of swear-to-god, gen-you-whine Democratic bloggers, for a return to the baller days of America under "the man from Hope," that priapic demiurge, William Jefferson Clinton, the first Black president, himself.

Well, I am overstating, but in praising Clinton's "generally free-market economic policies," they are intent on overlooking the central role of Clinton and Alan Greenspan in our current economic woes, the creditization and bubbleization of the American economy, the exponential growth of "financial services," the creation of the subprime industry, the recasting of private real estate as little more than a twice-held gambling chit, with which homeowners could buy ever more junk for the ever-growing houses in which they ever-more-temporarily resided, with which mortgage-backers and -holders could leverage ever-more-preposterous Ponzi-scheme investment strategies, to the tune of billions, hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars. Of course, at Reason Magazine you can still read John Stossel on how the government forced banks to lend money to poor niggers, thus destroying the universe. Which is a measure of something or other, but not economic acumen, not common sense.

Many self-professed libertarians, like Welch and Gillespie, praise the so-called deregulatory actions of Bill Clinton as his saving grace, when of course his government did what all recent American governments have done. If "deregulation" meant embracing a studied neutrality in matters of production, exchange, and trade, then it would be praisworthy. Instead, it simply means corporate favoritism, acting to lower the costs and responsibilities of the ownership class that they might still make their bonuses at the end of the fiscal year. Obama's zillion dollar subsidy to the financial sector that Bill Clinton created from the dust of the earth and one of Michael Milken's ribs is no break from the "free-market" instincts of his Democratic ancestor. It's just . . . America can't get high from a key bump anymore, and needs the dealer-in-chief to lay out some fatter rails.