E. J. DIONNE ASKS: "WHAT'S AN ECONOMY FOR?"

Or that's what he should've asked but I will give him credit to trying to take down the wingnut myth of the Free Market Fairy.

Capitalism's Reality Check

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, July 11, 2008; Page A17
Washington Post

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.
Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism."

The old script is in rewrite. "We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation," Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview.

He noted that in 1999 when Congress replaced the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act with a set of looser banking rules, "we let investment banks get into a much wider range of activities without regulation." This helped create the subprime mortgage mess and the cascading calamity in banking.

I found this encouraging because the Hudson Institute certainly isn't a Marxist coven:

Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad.

"You have to have the person who's writing the risk bearing the risk," he says. "That means a whole host of regulations. There's no way around that."

While some conservatives now worry about the social and economic impact of growing inequalities, Stelzer isn't one of them. But he is highly critical of "the process that produces inequality."

"I don't like three of your friends on a board voting you a zillion dollars," Stelzer, who is also a business consultant, told me. "A cozy boardroom back-scratching operation offends me." He argues that "the preservation of the capitalist system" requires finding new ways of "linking compensation to performance."

Jonah Goldberg blathers on about how "freer markets and free trade" have made the world "fantastically wealthier as a result" and later the same day, IndyMac is taken over because it was insolvent:

Office of Thrift Supervision shuts down IndyMac
Jul 11, 7:09 PM (ET)
By ALEX VEIGA

LOS ANGELES (AP) - IndyMac Bank's assets were seized by federal regulators on Friday after succumbing to the pressures of tighter credit, tumbling home prices and rising foreclosures.

The Office of Thrift Supervision said it transferred IndyMac's operations to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation because it did not think the lender could meet its depositors' demands.

The bank is the largest regulated thrift to fail and the second largest financial institution to close in U.S. history, regulators said.

"This institution failed today due to a liquidity crisis," OTS Director John Reich said. IndyMac had $32.01 billion in assets as of March 31.