Competing Economic Models
Alex is right, what’s going on right now is despicable. Unfortunately, it also seems pretty necessary. Will this hurt many people over time? Yes. Will we learn from these mistakes? Perhaps. The question comes down to “who’s doing the hurting and what is it we should learn.”
And, from what I can tell, the mistakes aren’t necessarily being made right now, they were made in the last couple decades with increasing deregulation of the financial markets.
And the best lesson to learn seems to me to be:
The liberal understanding of the economy and its problems has been, in recent months and years, superior to the conservative understanding of the country and its problems.
Whatever the spin ends up being, at least the plan actually being enacted is, as Ezra points out, what the smarter (Krugman Nobel, anyone?) economists have been putting forth.
Whether society takes the lesson and adopts their model long-term remains to be seen.
