Bowl Him Over With A Feather
Avedon Carol says:
"Markets are a great way to organize economic activity, but..."
Couldn't you just fall over laughing? Just like I usually do whenever I see that Alan Greenspan line Pfaff quoted the other day, about how when the Soviet Union fell he just assumed it would "automatically establish a free-market entrepreneurial system."
Hey, I only read comic books, but these people think they live in one.
Hahaha. In fact, I even know which comic book Alan and his little friends think they live in. It’s called “Atlas Shrugged” and has kept dreamy romantic schoolgirls and market fundamentalists of all ages atwitter and breathless for decades.
Read the whole post. It's a timely reminder of why we got all those pesky, intrusive regulations in the first place. And, it wasn't a perverse, liberal compulsion to make business owners lives difficult.
The article to which Avedon refers also says:
Mr. Greenspan said that after 1989 he - or ''we,'' as he put it - discovered that ''much of what we took for granted in our free-market system and assumed to be human nature was not nature at all, but culture. The dismantling of the central planning function in an economy does not, as some had supposed, automatically establish'' market capitalism.
It explains a lot about what has happened to the ex-Communist world since 1989 that men and women with the influence of Mr. Greenspan, occupying posts of great power, should have held so egregiously naive, or historically and culturally ''deaf,'' a belief as did Mr. Greenspan.
What in the hell is wrong with the intellectuals of the right? Has it simply become habit to disregard anything that doesn’t fit their narrow worldview and ideology?
Or are they just, as the recent Berkeley study found, so psychologically resistant to uncertainty, attached to dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity that they are simply incapable of being true intellectuals.
I don’t know, but it’s pretty clear that the ivory tower think tank culture of the right needs to do some serious reassessment if they plan to run the world. Their incompetence and naïveté is as breathtaking as anything we’ve seen since Russia in the 20’s.