The latest Ideas Matter update from Max Borders features these thoughts about the danger of government intervention:
Recall U.S. President George W. Bush, during the financial crisis of 2008, saying something like: We have to abandon capitalism in order to save it. To my ear, that had such a dissonant ring. First, it assumed we’d long been in a state of laissez faire — which conceded way too much to the progressive talking points. Second, it assumed that mopping of the mistakes of interventionism with more intervention was somehow a good thing.
It shows you how readily people are willing to accept the doctrine. It’s not ideological really. It’s apparently pragmatic. It’s a means of “fixing” something in the economic system that, to central engineers and economic tweakers, gets broken. People accept it as a means of “getting the economy back on track.” Unfortunately, it leads to crony capitalism — that blurring of big business and big government in which the world is truly controlled by elites.
I am not sanguine about the next twenty years. I’m not one for catastrophism. But I certainly worry that interventionism has won the day. If the U.S. is in any way the locus of power in turning the tide away from the grip of Keynesianism, I see no evidence that there is leadership capable of changing a system that is now designed for business and government to collude. I see the state blowing up more bubbles. I see leaders making politically expedient choices, not tough choices. The longer run looks like one in which Hayek described in his more pessimistic moments.
Hayek’s response is featured about 1:30 into the video below.
