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| Photo Credit: Bête à Bon-Dieu |
"I will do all I can to help you," Montague answered. "And you must be very severe with me," Lucy continued, "and not let me spend too much money, or make any blunders. That was the way [former business advisor] Mr. Holmes used to do, and since he is dead, I have positively been afraid to trust myself about."
-Upton Sinclair, "The Moneychangers"
From
Ron Paul to Mitt Romney, politicians consistently employ their own
framing of why the economy is performing poorly, and thus, promote a
consistent remedy for how to improve it. Government doesn't need to do
more, they contend, it needs to do less - less regulating, less
spending, less taxing. They believe in these solutions, I argue, not
necessarily because of some secret allegiance to the rich, but because
of their longstanding blind faith in the ability of the so-called "free
market" to correct economic problems on its own.
During
a recent appearance on The Daily Show, the libertarian Sen. Rand Paul
(R-Kentucky) championed the need for free-floating interest rates by
analogizing interest rate movements to the human body's production of
insulin.[1] That
such a complex economic process could be equated with an automatic
physiological process was not at all accidental. Just as though it were a
natural science, free-marketers firmly believe in capitalism's ability
to self-correct. Government, they argue, will only mess up (or, as they
like to say, "distort") this process. This is precisely what Ronald
Reagan was intimating when he famously declared, "Government is not the
solution to our problems, government is the problem."
The Myth of Self-Correction
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