The free market’s invisible hand picks the taxpayer’s pockets again
Joe Conason at Salon.com:
Now that we’re all about to take on hundreds of billions or perhaps a trillion dollars in new public debt to redeem the nation’s super-smart corporate financiers, there is one thing I hope we can expect in addition to postponing the apocalypse. Will they all please shut up about the wonders of the unfettered free market and the horrors of big government?
For decades, the investment class and their mouthpieces in the conservative movement have been telling Americans that if only we repealed all those musty old New Deal rules and programs, then we could enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Repeated endlessly by the think tanks, magazines and academics of the right-wing machinery, this message eventually drowned out the reality-based ideas of the American liberal tradition. Although those were the ideas that had actually built this country over the past century, they were erased from public consciousness by a combination of amnesia and propaganda.
September 20th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
In other news, John McCain supports private accounts instead of Social Security! Let’s see how fast those fat-cats can go bankrupt with old people’s money!
September 21st, 2008 at 6:10 am
You’ve got it backwards. This proposal would put younger people’s pensions at risk rather than older people. The roll-out plans I’ve seen create accounts for young people. Oldsters aren’t affected especially those already retired.
September 21st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Either way: he hates old people. In this example, he just hates the pre-old.