The Wall Street Journal’s village idiot, Thomas Frank, does it again in his column today.
Gloating over our economic turmoil, he says “We hear much less nonsense about the wisdom of markets these days.”
The markets that have crashed are those where federal intervention distorted incentives for decision-makers and created the “heads we win, tails the taxpayers lose” mentality. In true markets, individuals make decisions knowing that they’ll gain if their choices are good, but that they’ll lose if they’re bad. Is Frank unaware that federal meddling has destroyed those essential conditions in many markets?
He takes literally the idea that “markets” act. Markets are abstractions. People act. Left alone, they’ll search for the best uses of their talents and resources and that means finding things they can do or produce that other people want to buy. They aren’t always right. People make mistakes, but they quickly change as soon as they realize they’ve made a mistake. We only get massive upheavals as a result of government intervention, such as creating artificially low interest rates.
Is Frank that ignorant? Or is he trying to exploit the ignorance of others?
