Llewellyn H. Rockwell's "
Don't Bail Them Out" from September 10, 2008:
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The government should completely remove itself from the course of action and let the market reevaluate resource values. That means bankruptcies, yes. That means bank closures, yes. But these are part of the capitalistic system. They are part of the free-market economy. What is regrettable is not the readjustment process, but that the process was ever made necessary by the preceding interventions.…
We need to let the market handle the entire process, come what may. I guarantee that this solution is a better one than creating another trillion or so to bail out failing enterprises.
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Art Carden's "Should the Crisis Shake Our Faith in the Market?" from December 29, 2008:
Quote:
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Acclaimed minister Adrian Rogers once said that you cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. Trying to spread the wealth via a tax-and-redistribute scheme will not bring prosperity. It will only share misery (albeit perhaps more equitably). The solution is to pursue more market-oriented reforms that remove obstructions on entrepreneurs. As theory and evidence suggests, market-oriented reforms are not faith-based initiatives. They are our only hope for the long run.
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There are hundreds, even thousands, of such articles and statements from 2008 to the present. They appear every few days, and the message is the same: This stuff is not going to work. Their green shoots are an illusion. There will be no stimulus.
Let the market liquidate. Government should stop looting the private economy. The Fed should stop the money creation. No more bailouts. Let interest rates rise. Let bad banks fail. Above all: stop fighting the market! Only at that point can we have solid recovery.
And so here we are all this time later, poorer than we were, with no hope in sight for the real-world economy.
Why does anyone continue to take Krugman and company seriously? In fact, why does anyone take seriously those who warned that unless we tried the Keynesian plan, the world would end and we would miss an opportunity for a glorious recovery? It's not just the New York Times; it's also the Wall Street Journal and the entire financial press that continues to be enthralled with the absurdities of Keynesian theory.
Let's rub it in a bit more: The Austrians were also correct that the boom before 2008 was unsustainable. See "
The Bailout Reader." There is no joy in being right here. It is pathetic really that any informed observer of events would not be correct in light of experience and the common-sense observation that
government can't make prosperity appear no matter how many kabuki dances Treasury officials do.
On the winning team are those who understand sound economics. On the losing team are those who keep thinking that poison can cure the patient. So we say again: the stasis and depression will continue until the system is allowed to correct itself.