The American Spectator

Print Email

Text Size

The Spectacle Blog

A great response by John Carney to the recent Timothy Egan piece declaring Obama "effectively saved capitalism," which argues in part:

While I'm not especially interested in the question of whether Obama is a socialist (my instinct is to reply that Obama is not a socialist, he's a golfer), I think it's important to clear up this question of whether saving failed banks and failed automakers while holding interest rates artificially low is good for capitalism. Of course it isn't.

The word capitalism is usually used to refer to a system of free enterprise in which market processes are permitted to operate with relatively little intervention by the government. All of the things Egan describes as "good for capitalism" are, of course, the opposite of capitalism. They undermine market processes.

On the left this is an argument of convenience, of course, in much the same way they'll both bluster on about the wonderful profits our new financial advisor Uncle Sam is reaping for us via TARP and then go ballistic when any Republican candidate mentions a corporate background in campaign materials. "Government should not be run like a business!" Why not if it is supposedly so good at picking winners and losers and saving capitalism?