Flutterby™! : Bush on Free Markets 2008-12-18 17:51:54.09347+00

Bush on Free Markets

2008-12-18 17:51:54.09347+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

I've said before that many of the evils of the 1950s were people, McCarthy, Hoover and their ilk, who loved the United States as a nation, but loathed the principles underlying it. I believe that the past few years will go down in history similarly. "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system." -- GW Bush, at arount 1:40 on the video. Via Slate.com.

I find it incredibly curious that the average voter could not discern this in 2000 and 2004. This man has damaged and destroyed everything that he has touched. And still and yet there remain "believers" -- some 46% of the population who would have even more of the same line of failure. I suppose it proves that Madison Avenue does indeed have the power to control people's minds.

Not that the current replacement looks like much of a change, but at present seems only to be a gulp of air. We shall soon see if this is even enough to help us catch our breath.

Very misleading; he's ignoring that we didn't have a free market in the first place, haven't for years.

The problem with McCarthy wasn't his anti-communism; he just had the wrong people. We now know that Rosenberg was a spy as was Alger Hiss. Makes you wonder how many we missed.

Yeah, I believe that the USSR and communism were a huge threat to the United States, and I believe that Hoover and McCarthy and the like thought they were defending the United States against those evils, I just believe that they were doing so with their own evils, and in thinking that the ends justified the means, they missed what the results really were.

McCarthy was a drunk who couldn't cope with his own homosexuality. His anticommunism may have picked up a couple of spies, but not much for a net that was as wide and damaging as he cast. A lot of innocents were ruined directly as the result of the hysteria. Purges, imprisonments and worse, not only in this country but in others as well. One of them being Alan Turing. But many, many others fell to that particular tide of insanity.

Oh, and Shadow, no argument here on that point. Spend decades using government aid and intervention to prop-up/enable badly run companies with toxic work cultures, and eventually they'll implode with more negative impact than if they'd been allowed to fail earlier.

That's one of the things that pisses me off most about what the Republican party has become: Through claiming "free market" while doing their best to expand government intervention in the economy, they've given liberty a bad name.

"The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down." Huey P Long