Jonah Goldberg at NRO today offers the apparent Pub prez candidate a salient cautionary note. Goldberg notes Romney's tendency to talk in terms of Washington needing to be "friendly to business." Mitt may mean well; he may be talking about small-scale entrepreneurs as well as the starched-shirt bureaucrats who oversee unwieldy behemoths whose stock shares are publicly traded in the canyons of lower Manhattan. He would not run the risk of it coming off that way if he stuck with rhetoric centered on freedom. As Goldberg points out, Americans are increasingly wary of anything that smacks of industrial policy or glistening wing tips passing through a revolving door between Washington and points north on the eastern seaboard. Certainly conservatives have had quite enough of central planning, corporate appeasement of leftist schemes, and wonky, technocratic approaches to economic issues.
It doesn't seem like Mitt's natural inclination to get this, but now is the time to start trying to reach him on it.
Oh yeah, let economic freedom ring. In the news today is a report on the again booming US credit default swap market because of Spain's economic crisis. These are unregulated forms of insurance and contributed to our own meltdown back in 08. Go get em grubbers. Bloggie thinks that as your wallets bulge so doth the populace's.
ReplyDeleteWhat is your understanding of how free market economics works?
ReplyDeleteMust be final exam time for Lecturer Quick. Please correct me if I have mislabled you. No tme for either seargents or essays today. What is your understanding of how corp fraud and mismanagement revealed chiefly after 9/11 work(s)?
ReplyDeleteThat it's an inevitable byproduct of the interactivity of fallen human beings, but that there are laws in place that impose penalties on the perpetrators of such fraud. Now, mismanagement is another matter. If a board of dirctors hires someone who subsequently mismanages a business, the board can then fire the person and begin looking at how it could have detected the manager's lack of competency sooner.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, neither fraud nor mismanagement make for arguments against economic freedom.
Nor is government regulation and oversight whic you conx cry tyrrany over. Look, this current economy is still reeling from the sins of the supposed stewarts of prosperity. Nope, need a referee and wathdog.
ReplyDeleteTo do what, exactly?
ReplyDeleteI almost get the impression that you think malfeasance and funny business are the norm in the world of commerce.
That's what the Freedom-Haters would like us to believe, so that they can use measures like Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank to strangle economic activity in America.
May I direct you to Bush appointee Ben Bernanke's recent remarks blaming the shadow banking of AIG much more than the subprime lending you cons have fingered. Of course you'd rather blame Dems. I don't trust you guys your virtue of selfishness is a deadly sin to the masses you detest..
ReplyDeleteI want to make sure I have an accurate understanding of your position. So you're saying that because occasionally a large banking concern makes some poor decisions, all restaurants, hair salons, plastic-molding factories, insurance agencies, landscaping companies, piano-tuning businesses, butcher shops, shoe repair shops, architects' offices, heating-and-air-conditioning dealerships, transmission repair shops, computer stores and fitness gyms should be owned by the government?
ReplyDeleteOf course not.
ReplyDeleteIt sure sounds like you are arguing, since you chose to bring up large investment banks in a context in which the matter at hand was a defense of basic free market economics, that there is something a priori depraved about wanting to start and own a business.
ReplyDeleteTypical overreaction by the bloggie. We'll chalk it up as more of his prototypical hyperbolic paranoia. Like some variation of their dominoe theory his ilk always carts out when they feel threatened.
ReplyDeletePurveyors of gold and identity theft protection target conservative talk show markets for a reason.
ReplyDelete