An op-ed from Ian Williams, at the Guardian UK:
The end of voodoo economicsAs the all-too-often selectively quoted Adam Smith actually said: "All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."
No one can say that current events are a one-off. The get-government-out-of-business brigade, the masters of the universe, have in their three decades of unbridled power produced the savings and loan bail-out, the Mexican bond bail-out, the Asian currency crisis, the Enron and other related scandals, the tech bubble, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse and rescue, a wage freeze for working Americans and now this.
And the irony is that these vile people who are now graciously agreeing to pocket a trillion dollars of taxpayers' cash have been arguing for three decades that government has no business in business, least of all in pension provision. In their famous phrase, it would pose a "moral hazard" for ordinary Americans to think that their government would look after them if in old age their income or their health failed them.
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With the sudden affection for government ownership and assistance now globalising its way consensually from Washington, will we see a new, social-democratic age of government involvement in industry? Probably not soon. But as Churchill said, this surely deserves to be beginning of the end of the Washington neoliberal consensus that George Bush's father called voodoo economics. Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and even Gordon Brown all succumbed to that old black magic – and looking at Barack Obama's economic advisers, there is a more than even chance that he, too, is under its spell.
More here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/sep/26/us.economy.wall.street
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