The Buie Knife

Libertarian Free Market Philosophy is Now Completely Bankrupt: Devastating Critiques of Greenspan's Reign at FED from the Left and Right

After reading Alan Greenspan's Age of Turbulence, I decided to look up some of the critiques of his  tenure as Federal Reserve Chairman. In mainstream media, Greenspan's profile for his entire two-decade tenure was overwhelmingly positive, almost godlike. Bob Woodward of The Washington Post described him in his 2000 book as The Maestro, brilliantly conducting the nation's economic orchestra and leading to an almost endless American boom. But since the collapse of the stock market and the financial services industry, revisionism of Greenspan's tenure is rampant. Probably Greenspan's harshest critic among financial journalists has been William Greider, formerly of The Washington Post and for many years now with The Nation. To Greider's credit, he was harshly critical of Greenspan's policies from the very beginning.

In the fall of 2008, Greider wrote The Lies of Alan Greenspan in The Nation, pointing out that the chairman was far more responsible for the nation's economic woes than he cared to acknowledge.

Conservative's Very Tough Job. Are They Hopelessly Fragmented?

Ron Moore defends AIG bonuses, eliminating habeas corpus and due process rights for Guantanamo detainees and, if necessary, torturing them (click), and despite the huge recent losses in the stock market, maintains that it's still a good idea to privatize social security. That's a heckuva political platform, but he holds out hope that "perhaps we will see a new party formed from the ashes of the Republican Party in the next several years."

Republicans in Congress are more ambivilant about the AIG bonuses, attacking them as an outrage but unsure what to do about them. And privatizing social security seems to be off the GOP agenda entirely.

As for torture at Guantanamo Bay, Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, says the orders to sweep up innocents and to torture them came directly from the offices of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. He called Cheney's attack on the Obama administration's terrorism policies "almost mystifying in its twisted logic and terrifying in its fear-mongering." 

Is it fair to observe that the right is hopelessly fragmented on these three issues?

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• Republican Party Suicide Pact?

Is Obama A Socialist?

Asked by The New York Times if he's "a socialist," Obama said he isn't:

"It wasn’t under me that we started buying a bunch of shares of banks. It wasn’t on my watch. And it wasn’t on my watch that we passed a massive new entitlement – the prescription drug plan without a source of funding. And so I think it’s important just to note when you start hearing folks through these words around that we’ve actually been operating in a way that has been entirely consistent with free-market principles and that some of the same folks who are throwing the word socialist around can’t say the same."

If, when he became President, "the market was doing fine, nobody would be happier than me to stay out of it. I have more than enough to do without having to worry the financial system. The fact that we’ve had to take these extraordinary measures and intervene is not an indication of my ideological preference, but an indication of the degree to which lax regulation and extravagant risk taking has precipitated a crisis.

Ray LaHood, Obama's Secretary of Transportation, says of the $40 billion for the U.S. Department of Transportation: "It's not socialism, it's economic development. It is going to provide an economic engine around communities all over America for jobs; good paying jobs; and help people pay their bills...It is going to drive the economies in a lot of states and a lot of communities."

Related:

• 'We Are All Socialists Now'
• 'Great Achievements of American Socialism'

'I'm Sorry, Rush', Plus Limbaugh's Parallels to Father Coughlin

Ron Moore wrote in the comments section of this blog that Rush Limbaugh "is sounding a little silly, but then he has for years--ever since he became fixated on Clinton and tried to sell him as the anti-Christ." Oops -- like numerous Republicans, Ron had better check out the website, "I'm Sorry Rush" and fill out the form. Limbaugh is the de facet leader of the GOP right now. "Whenever a Republican criticizes him, they have to run back and apologize to him."

Update: Obama's latest insult is to gloat that Senator Edward Kennedy will be dead by the time a health care bill passes. His repeatedly uncivil remarks have sparked an online petition drive urging Republican leaders to disassociate themselves from Rush.

An historian friend describes Limbaugh as "the Father Coughlin" of this era, to Obama's Roosevelt. Coughlin's radio show in the late 1920s and 1930s attracted as many as 45 million listeners. He started out as a populist, railing against elites, but became increasingly nasty, scapegoating minorities, particularly Jews. His "Somebody Must Be Blamed" essay is worth a read for its parallels to today.

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• 'I Want Obama to Fail.'

A Republican Concession, of Sorts, Already

The positive message of the Obama campaign in a time of great anxiety:

I suspect the harshly negative tone of the Republicans' campaign, their tone of despair, and their loss of faith in the American people has contributed as much to their loss as anything else.

Ron Moore emails: "I guess to be on the losing side of history now means that individual effort and achievement is out the window (what are we going to do with sports which are all about individual effort and achievement—scrap 'em I guess since they are the wrong model), self-responsibility is out the window…..I guess we will see if the Brave New World of the Big O True Believers will succeed.  I don't have long left on this mortal coil, but I shudder to think about the grey, dreary, regimented world that your "new history" will bring my kids and grandkids...A Democratic win promises the end of individual liberty and opportunity.  You guys are into groupthink…the masses rather than persons."

I wrote back: "You remind me of the cartoon characters of Confederate Generals and the old-timers who thought of themselves as Confederates I knew as a child. "Forget? Hell. NEVER!" they'd say, cursing the Yankees and defending "the Southern way of life" (ie white male legal and political superiority) against the negroes and their communist, homosexual sidekicks.

I continued: "Glad you acknowledge you're on the losing side of history, but you seem to have some fantastical, dogma-induced notion about how horrible the future is going to be. I hope you live long enough to see the absurdity of your so-called vision, though I wonder if you'd be able to recognize it. Mind if I quote your statement as to what the future holds on my blog? We can look at it later to see how right (or wrong) you turned out to be...."

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• 'I Surrender,' Free Market Fundamentalist Finally Concedes. Disgusted with $700 billion bailouts, he says Republicans are just like Democrats.

Those Dastardly American Socialists: TR, RR, W, McCain and Palin

If, as Sarah Palin improbably claims, Obama is a socialist, so is Teddy Roosevelt (John McCain's favorite president), Ronald Reagan,  George W. Bush, and McCain and Palin themselves. Given these facts, I just can't believe charges of "socialism" resonate against Obama. It makes no sense. The Republican Party pursues this charge to its own detriment, to permanent minority status and complete irrelevancy.

Then again:

John Judis, New Republic blog: "McCain and Sarah Palin's attack against Obama for advocating "spreading the wealth" and for "socialism" and for pronouncing the civil rights revolution a "tragedy" because it didn't deal with the distribution of wealth is aimed ultimately at white working class undecided voters who would construe "spreading the wealth" as giving their money to blacks. It's the latest version of Reagan's "welfare queen" argument from 1980. It if it works, it won't be because most white Americans actually oppose a progressive income tax, but because they fear that Obama will inordinately favor blacks over them. I don't doubt that this argument will have some effect, but I suspect it's too late and that worries about McCain and Republican handling of the economy will overshadow these concerns."

Guess Who Said This?

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

Hugo Chavez, George Bush See Eye to Eye on Economics

As President Bush nationalizes the banking industry, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez welcomes President Bush into the realm of socialism. "How are you, comrade Bush?" he asks. Ron Moore, stalwart conservative on this blog, says if McCain supports this deal (Fox reports that he does), "real believers" in the free market  will opt not to vote in the presidential race.

Related:

• 'I Surrender,' Free Market Fundamentalist Finally Concedes
• Blog on Economics, Investments, Social Security, and Free Market Fundamentalism

'I Surrender,' Free Market Fundamentalist Finally Concedes

Free market fundamentalist Ron Moore and I have had an ongoing debate for years on this blog about the proper relationship between government and the economic marketplace. He argued that government should never intervene in the free market, and that Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt were dead wrong. FDR, in his view, seduced Americans to abandon their courage, character, belief in self-sufficiency and self-reliance to embrace the outright socialism of the New Deal.

I argued that he was deeply out of touch with the suffering of Americans during the Great Depression, and didn't recognize the absolute necessity of FDR's efforts to intervene in the economy, regulate it, create safety nets, and essentially save capitalism from its own flaws in the 1930s.

Ron had said he could never vote Democrat for president because Democrats don't believe in the free market. Well, now, after the $700 billion in bailouts to the financial services industry engineered by the Republican administration, supported by Republicans in Congress and the GOP candidate for President, he emails me and says, "I surrender. The parties have finally become alike."

Historic Shift from Unfettered Faith in Free Markets to Government Intervention By Bush and McCain

In discussing the history of political ideas, I subscribe to Hegel's dialectic. A political thesis takes hold of the public imagination, followed by a reaction against it (antithesis) when the downsides become visible, then a merger of certain aspects of political philosophies originally seen as opposites (synthesis).

If Reagan-era conservatism was a reaction against New Deal-Great Society liberalism and bloated bureaucracies, with faith that free markets, deregulation and rugged individualism could solve most social problems, it has run its course. We are moving toward a more communitarian approach, with less faith in free markets and more desire for regulations to protect the public, and that shift is largely reflected in policies of the Bush administration and proposals of the McCain campaign. McCain, as NYT columnist Frank Rich noted, reversed his initial condemnation of mortgage bailouts in just two weeks, and now flirts with autoworkers about a GM bailout.

The Wall Street Journal provides evidence that we're now in a historic shift of perceptions about the benefits of government regulation:

"Unraveling Reagan: Amid Turmoil, U.S. Turns Away from Decades of Regulation. The housing and financial crisis convulsing the U.S. is powering a new wave of government regulation of business and the economy.Federal and state governments alike are increasingly hands-on in their effort to deal with failing businesses, plunging house prices, worthless mortgages and soaring energy prices. The steps add up to a major challenge to the movement toward deregulation that has defined American governance for much of the past quarter-century since the "Reagan Revolution" of the early 1980s. In fact, some proponents today of a bigger oversight role for government are Republican heirs to the legacy of President Reagan."  Read the whole thing.

The LA Times adds to the mix by profiling Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's shift from unfettered faith in free markets to chief spokesman for government intervention.

Ed Cone, who tipped me off by linking to the WSJ and LA Times articles on his blog, responds to my thesis.

Related:

• Attacks on McCain from the Right
• Free Market Fundamentalists Leave Capitalism Naked to High-Risk Takers Who Hand Us Their Bills