No Atheists in Foxholes, No Libertarians in Financial Crises:
This is the line that Paul Krugman uttered the other night to some great yucks from the Bill Maher crowd.
Not really an original thought for Krugman — see Jeff Frankel’s remarks from last July.
Krugman in typical fashion communicates his point in a smug fashion and implies that only someone completely bonkers would maintain a libertarian stance. But the reason we are in this mess to begin with is because we weren’t bonkers enough to pursue libertarian economic policies. Instead, statist intervention in financial markets has been pursued for decades. Government policies that privatized profits, but socialized losses; easy credit monetary policy; regulations which favored some groups at the expense of others, etc. all created our current mess. NOT free markets, and only free markets will permit the adjustments to economic realities that are required to get the market economy back on-track.
I don’t know about atheists in foxholes, but I do know that only economic libertarianism can get us out of the mess of political capitalism we are currently in. To argue otherwise, as Krugman and his crowd do, not only belies a fundamental lack of economic understanding, but an innocence of public choice.
