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Tuesday, December 23, 2008

An Ominous Trend

When Italy nationalized banks in 1933, “the architects who designed the system envisaged it as temporary,” she says. “It was in place until the end of the 1990s.” More recently, the Japanese government injected capital into banks to get them to lend to big corporations, keeping alive “the zombie companies that economists talk about,” she says.


Even as Hank Paulson, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and President Bush assure the public that the trend toward government control of business is 'temporary,' the lesson from history shows the opposite.

An article at Bloomberg entitled, 'Saving Capitalism is No Sure Thing as Statism Undermines the Economy,' presents a sobering, clear-headed perspective on the current trend against free markets in favor of socialistic concepts that form the core of centralized government control.

The problem is that history proves that such government interventionism does nothing to prevent economic distress but prolongs it.

The other lesson from history is that once governments gain such control over free enterprise they are very reluctant to relinquish that control.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once governments, any governments, establish control over something, it takes copious amounts of effort to get them to give it up. As many philosophers before us have noted, our means of government has, within it, the seeds of its own destruction, and we probably seeing more than a few of those sprouting merrily along at this point.

Welshman said...

Unfortunately, I agree. We have reached the tipping point at which the citizens have discovered they can vote themselves into serfdom all in the name of getting a bounty from the public treasury.