We'll Take Care Of The Needy, If You'll Just Let Us!

by Dick Mac

The post-Reagan so-called "free market" drove our economy into the ground, to near-ruin. The apologists will tell you that the reason our economy failed is that industry is still too regulated; that they need to be given completely free reign in order for beneficent capitalism to flourish. Libertarians and "conservatives" will tell you that the only reason capitalism is failing America is that we keep it too constrained by government regulation. What they fail to discuss is that business and industry today have fewer constraints than ever in the history of the post-Depression world. Everywhere around the world.

Oh! If only we would allow the markets and the industrialists and the bankers and manufacturers to operate with no oversight, no taxation, and no limits, then America would be a capitalist nirvana where freedom rings and everyone is healthy. The streets would flow with honey and manna would fall from the heavens.

This is not a new song they are singing. In fact, the last time these people (those who allegedly believe in liberty and conservation) had operated with this little restraint was in the first part of the 20th Century, when they drove the world economy into the ground. At that time (the 1930s), our amazing, beneficent government had to save the world.

These remarks by FDR, in 1936, could have been written yesterday!





We can save the world again; but only if we turn away from the economic policies of the past three decades.

If you support supply-side economic theory (Reaganomics), you have nothing to complain about: you have been given plenty of rope. Watching you hang yourselves with it is not as amusing as I thought it might be.