{"id":650,"date":"2008-09-19T21:49:02","date_gmt":"2008-09-20T02:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/?p=650"},"modified":"2008-09-19T21:49:04","modified_gmt":"2008-09-20T02:49:04","slug":"the-crisis-in-one-paragraph-and-two-thoughts-of-my-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/2008\/09\/the-crisis-in-one-paragraph-and-two-thoughts-of-my-own\/","title":{"rendered":"The Crisis in One Paragraph and Two Thoughts of My Own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/austrianeconomists.typepad.com\/weblog\/2008\/09\/the-crisis-in-o.html\">The Austrian Economist: The Crisis in One Paragraph and Two Thoughts of My Own<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:20pt;\">Our friend Larry White at <a href=\"http:\/\/divisionoflabour.com\/archives\/005139.php\">Division of Labor<\/a> puts it succinctly:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-indent:20pt;\">\n<blockquote><p>On greed, let me repeat:  <em>If unusually many airplanes crash during a<br \/>\ngiven week, do you blame gravity? No. Greed, like gravity, is a<br \/>\nconstant. It can\u2019t explain why the number of crashes is higher than<br \/>\nusual.<\/em> And let me add: This isn\u2019t a morality play. What we\u2019re<br \/>\nseeing are the consequences of monetary-policy distortions of interest<br \/>\nrates and regulatory distortions of incentives, amplified in some<br \/>\ndegree by private imprudence, not the consequences of blackheartedness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>And what all of this points out is that laying the finger of blame on &#8220;the free market&#8221; is utterly in error, but it&#8217;s an error that&#8217;s going to get made continually over the months and years to come.  If there&#8217;s one thing those of us on this side of the battle of ideas can do as this all unfolds, it&#8217;s to do whatever we can to remind people that the interventionist economy that caused the problems and led to privatized profits and socialized losses (and the &#8220;solutions&#8221; that will further socialize losses) are NOT &#8220;the free market.&#8221;  Asking why anyone would think bigger government will solve these problems when it was the major cause is another public service we can provide.<\/p>\n<p>Even though I firmly believe that the fundamentals of the US economy remain strong and that this is <em>not<\/em> the start of another Great Depression, it is disconcerting to be apparently living through the start of a round of the <a href=\"http:\/\/hnn.us\/blogs\/entries\/54649.html\">Higgsian<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/hnn.us\/blogs\/entries\/54590.html\">ratchet<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Austrian Economist: The Crisis in One Paragraph and Two Thoughts of My Own Our friend Larry White at Division of Labor puts it succinctly:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":647,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-650","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pekNN-au","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/647"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joewhite.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}