"These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it," George W. Bush said in Orwellian tones Tuesday as he announced the partial nationalization of nine major American banks.
He was partly right, though not in the way he meant his words. There is no free financial market to take over. But that means there is no free market to preserve either. The moves he announced, which include government part-ownership of smaller banks too, were just more, albeit big, steps along the corporatist route the country has been following for generations.
The rest of this week's TGIF, "Capitalism or Freedom," is at the Foundation for Economic Education website.
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I gave my brother a copy of Rothbard's What Has Government Done to Our Money, in my efforts to persuade him that our fiat money system is a folly. While he could see that there was merit to it, he really could not accept the conclusions, since we haven't experienced onerous price inflation in recent years and life is still good for many (such as himself) in the American economy. I may be unduly pessimistic, but it seems to me that it is nearly impossible to impress upon the vast majority of people the destructiveness of various political and economic policies until the point where they have become ruinous and extremely difficult to reverse.
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