…that I won’t miss George Bush. He did an interview with the Star Telegram the other day. He talked about a range of things (including space policy, which I’ll discuss in a separate post), but this makes me crazy:
No question that the economic — the current economic situation is very difficult and it obscures the fact that during my time in office we had 52 uninterrupted months of job creation, which was a record. The current economic crisis began before my presidency. All of us who have held office during — from the genesis of the crisis until today bear responsibility.
On the other hand, given the stark nature of the financial situation and the dangers inherent with it, I have moved and moved very aggressively. We have abandoned free market principles and did what it took to prevent the financial system from melting down.
The implication of that last was that we were in the midst of some sort of riot of laissez faire up until September, then had to suddenly “abandon free market principles.” But what happened had nothing to do with free-market principles. Unless, that is, you consider strong-arming by Congress into handing out dodgy loans to unworthy home buyers is somehow a “free market principle.” Or that putting so much paperwork requirements on the accounting of public corporations (see Oxley, Sarbanes) that it has almost shut down the IPO market, and inhibited the formation of new startups is a “free-market principle.”
This kind of foolish rhetoric plays right into the hands of the people who demagogued the Democrats into power, with their talk about all of the mythical “deregulation” under “Republicans” that somehow resulted in the current financial mess, even thought they cannot point to a single actual instance of such “deregulation” (at least not in the Bush years). If they think that repealing Glass-Steagal was a bad idea (I don’t, in and of itself), that happened under that famous free marketeer, Bill Clinton.
I expect the Democrats to rewrite history, but I’m not going to miss a supposedly Republican president who acquiesces to it. And John McCain would have been no better.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, here’s reason 32,468:
Two more former top Bush Justice Department officials have endorsed the nomination of Eric Holder for attorney general, the latest in a growing list of GOP backers for Holder.
In letters obtained by Politico and expected to be released shortly, Paul McNulty and Larry Thompson, both of whom served as deputy attorney general under President George W. Bush, threw their support behind Holder, who was a deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.
James Comey, another Bush deputy attorney general, has also backed Holder.
This says much more to me about the poor quality of Bush Justice Department picks than it does about the merits of Eric Holder. I hope that the otherwise worthless senior Senator from Pennsylvania puts up the kind of fight against Holder that he’s been hinting at (though I wish that someone would also ask him about his views on the Second Amendment and Heller).
[Afternoon update]
For anyone interested, I’ve put up a post about the space portion of the president’s interview now.
I have a different read: that we as a country have tried to strike a balance between free market principles and “social justice” [sic] — and we have enjoyed the benefits of a mixed economy with relatively high growth and relatively little “Les Miserables”-level misery. When the system got seriously out of balance, however, President Bush set aside the free market principles that are the foundation of growth, with the intention of preserving the system for later “rebalancing”. I write extensively about the contradiction between the desire for free markets and the desire for a continuously expanding social safety net at http://blog.bbbeard.com/2008/10/08/contradictions/.
BBB
Sadly, the lefties that blame Bush for all sorts of things, even the economy, will not understand that President Bush’s worst decision was abadoning the free market principles for a short lived political stunt.
Of course, it was also bad that McCain decided to take advantage of the political stunt, only to show his own supporters how quickly he could abandon his principles as well. McCain was always in a tough fight, but he lost all chance at the Presidency when he voted for that pork laden bill to socialize the banking industry. A vote against, even if he couldn’t explain it well, might have won him the day.
When did McCain ever have any free-market principles to abandon?
According to McCain, he was a Reagan Republican. I have never seen it, but that’s what he claimed. I don’t know how anyone could be a Reagan Republican and not have strong beliefs that the free market principles work.
According to McCain, he was a Reagan Republican. I have never seen it, but that’s what he claimed.
Well, I haven’t seen it, either. I seriously doubt that (for example) there would have been a Reagan-Feingold public finance law. Or that Reagan would have promoted handouts to “keep people in their homes” when they didn’t own the homes in any useful sense.
Who are you going to believe, John McCain, or your lying eyes?
The Bush administration warned congress about bad lending practices at Freddie and Fannie as far back as (I think) 2001, and several times over the next few years they visited Capitol Hill repeated the message. Congress’s refusal to act ultimately left Bush with only one option, one that only John Galt could love: wait for the system to collapse, then do something about it.
If the President’s advisor’s were right — that inaction of the type prescribed by Paulsen would result in a true economic disaster — then you can hardly call Bush’s decision an abandonment of free market principles. Due to the government’s meddling in the mortgage market via Freddie and Fannie, the market wan’t running on free market principles to begin with. The extraordinary measures taken by Bush and Paulsen may not have been consistent with free market principles, but then they were emergency measures not policy changes, more like a tourniquet than a plan for long term care.
I’m not saying that Paulsen or Bush were right, but it seems illogical to criticize an emergency action as being unprincipled. In a crisis you may need to suspend normal rules and take emergency actions. The risk, of course, is that the emergency measures become normalized instead of expiring when the crisis passes. (That’s why I have my eye on Obama right about now.)
If the President’s advisor’s were right — that inaction of the type prescribed by Paulsen would result in a true economic disaster — then you can hardly call Bush’s decision an abandonment of free market principles.
I didn’t call it that — he did. That’s what I’m complaining about. Did you actually read my post?
> Congress’s refusal to act ultimately left Bush with only one option, one that only John Galt could love: wait for the system to collapse, then do something about it.
Not so fast. He could have talked about the oncoming train. He could have forced Dems to loudly argue that everything was great.
Instead, he walked away. And when things went bad, they were off the hook.
I can’t actually rank my disgust with various political figures right now because there’s just too much of it to go around.
>>> I didn’t call it that — he did. That’s what I’m complaining about. Did you actually read my post? <<<
I started to. It seems my mind’s comment-generation-threshold was reached just before you began to get to your point. Having now read the rest, I can only (blushingly) say: I agree and well said.
(In my defense, I’m usually not so hasty. I think my faux pas is good evidence of how fed up I am with exactly what you describe, all the false rhetoric about capitalism and free market principles being to blame for the financial crisis. And yes, it is even more exasperating when it comes from Republican party leaders. As you wrote. I’ll shut up now.)
In the spirit of naming a toll road after a tax-hiking Bush, we need to name some super-sized pork project after Dubya, preferably one connected with these bailouts.
I still think we could defray some of the bailout cost by opening up a Henry Paulson dunking booth.
Yes, it really pains me that Bush and the Republicans have laid the groundwork for the wholesale government takeover of the economy and Obama hasn’t even taken office yet.
If they intended it as a temporary emergency measure that would later be rolled back, then they have grievously miscalculated.
I lay a large portion of the blame on Hank Paulson, who was of course appointed by Bush. His Chicken Little act, accompanied by much arm-waving and shrieking, seemed to me to coincide with the collapse of the stock market in September. One would think that the Treasury Secretary should try to instill public confidence in the economy rather than instigate a stampede for the exits.
I lay a large portion of the blame on Hank Paulson, who was of course appointed by Bush. His Chicken Little act, accompanied by much arm-waving and shrieking, seemed to me to coincide with the collapse of the stock market in September. One would think that the Treasury Secretary should try to instill public confidence in the economy rather than instigate a stampede for the exits.
It isn’t “Chicken Little”, if the sky is falling. Too bad so little was accomplished (aside from bailing out some businesses and people who should have gone under).