Quotes That Catch My Fancy

. . . economic downturns do offer the motivated reporter anopportunity to speculate on the possible political consequences ofunflagging public and media ignorance. The causes for our currenteconomic troubles are evidently too complex to fathom, so insteadof writing intelligibly about what is actually happening and why,we are asked to wonder (hope? fear?) whether voters can be made todemand a "New Deal Lite," before the economy regains steam and webecome too satisfied to regulate ourselves into oblivion.

It would be useful if journalists could find a way to reporton the actual nature of the American economy. This would be a realpublic service. The American economy is in fact a byzantine amalgamof market and state institutions enmeshed in a thicket ofregulation. Gosselin maintains that "most people" in the U.S. thinkthere is something out there called "the free market" that operateswithout "government meddling." I'm not really sure that most peoplethink that, but it seems Gosselin does, because he goes on tostructure his "news analysis" as if the story is thatdissatisfaction with a kind of laissez faire we donot have may be generating demand for basically the kind ofdirigisme we've already got. But since economicsystems we haven't got can't cause our economic problems, theresult is confusion.

Consider the fact that the Federal Reserve is a centralplanning committee. We are lucky, I think, to have intelligent,highly professional planners, but there are in-principle limits towhat they can do with limited information, and so there is no waythey are not going to get it wrong sometimes, or a lot of times.The housing "bubble," which has turned out very badly for a lot ofpeople, and the historically high price of gas, which is to a largeextent a function of the low value of the American dollar, probablyhas had a lot to do with the policies chosen by our monetarycentral planners. Failures of government planning don't discreditfree markets. Rather, they suggest free markets might be worthtrying some time.

--WillWilkinson.