That Ain't Blood, it's Just the Market Correcting.

The best thing government can do now is let the market correct.
— Jason Lewis

It is all a reminder that the biggest threat to a healthy economy is not the socialists of campaign lore. It’s C.E.O.’s. It’s politically powerful crony capitalists who use their influence to create a stagnant corporate welfare state.
— David Brooks

Doctrinaire free marketeers like radio talker Jason Lewis persist in the canard that too much government meddling brought on our economic mess and insist the best thing the government can do anytime is leave the market alone. They would just pull the refs from the game and let the players cheat each other fair and square.

Sort of like the last eight years.

The first five commenters on his piece have pretty well taken it apart. Two samples:

Rather than explain the miserable failure of his party and partisans' policies, Lewis continues to promote an incomprehensible, one-dimensional understanding of the economy. Ineffective and inefficient government is one part of our problem. Corporate cronies in our largest companies privatizing profits and socializing losses is another part. Lewis seeks to reconfirm his pre-existing beliefs by selectively (mis)identifying the problem as government. In an economy where the government regulates the flow of capital in response to the demands of big business it is incredibly dishonest and highly deceptive to speak of "markets," offering resolution to the current problem.

*****
I'm a conservative on fiscal matters, but I disagree with J. Lewis. We need infrastructure improvements and the costs of doing these projects will never be cheaper than over the next few years. I am against new entitlements and creating huge permanent programs, but let's have a large stimulus package that employees some of the construction workers laid off from the housing and commerical building contraction in road and bridge construction. Let's come out the other side of this recession with vastly improved infrastructure, while making the recession shallower and shorter.

Progressives who believe that government can be a positive force should acknowledge that we could find common cause with some conservatives here.

The game itself has been fixed to benefit the crony capitalists, and this should disturb progressives and fiscal conservatives alike. We should not just fall in line with bailouts because Obama and the Democrats are now stuck with the problem and must decisively act like they know how to fix this. Dumping money into institutions is just another form of trickle down economics. The money will evaporate before it reaches the people on the ground.

As Brooks says,

But the larger principle is over the nature of America’s political system. Is this country going to slide into progressive corporatism, a merger of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition, empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched interests? Or is the U.S. going to stick with its historic model: Helping workers weather the storms of a dynamic economy, but preserving the dynamism that is the core of the country’s success.