As it happens, free market economics, which rightly stresses the superiority of non-interventionist policies, works better in general. It's merely that the market isn't ever as free as it needs to be to function. Groups want favors. They want backs scratched and ears rubbed. As much as is possible, and as often. Pretty soon you've got a subprime mortgage mess, and a $700 billion bailout of institutions "too big to fail" without taking down their neighbors.
Here we are, then -- beginning, it would appear, a new cycle in which regulators and bureaucracies, responsive to the political trade, make the big, important calls for us. You know -- to protect us. That's until somewhere down the line, as during the wreck of the Carter presidency, we reacquaint ourselves with the cost of political protection: the distortions, the unfairnesses, the political logrolling that goes into government control.
How the Democrats will acquit themselves this week, with the Paulson package on the table, we'll see soon enough. Will hopes and plans and designs for the election of Barack Obama drive the train over Republican objections about even more government intervention -- if possible -- than the Bush administration proposes?
I, um, don't believe I'd rule it out, on the basis of what we're seeing right now.