The Washington Post (September 25, 2008): “Bailout Has Cato Saying, ‘Told You So’: Think Tank’s Scholars Pained and Pumped By Government Action”
“Our job is to roll up our sleeves and start talking about what the sources of all these problems are,” says President Ed Crane, who founded the think tank in 1977.
“The biggest emotion we’re feeling right now is frustration that the media narrative is that this is a crisis of the free market, a crisis of capitalism, a crisis of under-regulation,” Boaz says. “In fact it’s a crisis of subsidization and intervention.”
The main source: Can’t you guess? Yes: the government. According to the Cato narrative, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were big-government creatures to begin with. Then, ill-advised government subsidies and incentives drove the creation of dubious mortgages and the bundling of rotten mortgage-backed securities, whose disintegration allegedly threatens to wreck the economy from Wall Street to Main Street.
True enough, but I think a complete analysis requires considering the role of the market players who use the government system. The existence of food stamps does not force someone who otherwise qualifies for them to obtain them. The existence of dubious financial instruments does not force people to borrow upon them. I have observed able-bodied anarchists who obtained food stamps because they could. They are disgusting. The government policy may be bad, but so are they. The same is true for financial practices that anyone with common sense should know are unwise.
Gee Tom. And who was pretty much the lone voice in Congress warning us about these things for years? That’s right. Ron Paul.
The same Ron Paul that certain persons at Cato deem “unworthy” of support because he happens to be friends with your feuding partner. And I’ve seen a hell of a lot more of Paul on TV today than Ed Crane or anybody at Cato. Just goes to show what some of us have been saying all along: when libertarians would rather shoot at their own over petty personality squabbles, they push an already marginal movement into complete political irrelevancy. Meanwhile it’s business as usual in D.C. no matter how loud Cato screams once it finally decides to join the chorus.
It’s a shame few people take RP seriously. And think tanks can’t support candidates. It seems kind of elementary, as it’s actually a requirement of federal law.
Here are a few Cato contributions to the discussion:
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9389
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9650
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9557
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9635
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9599
http://cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9379
http://www.catomedia.org/archive-2008/odriscoll-wbt-9-9-08.mp3
I could go on. (The Cato internal search engine is very good.) Kudos to Cato.
This has the potential to bias the whole debate over voluntarism vs. coercive control for many years to come. I applaud the efforts of Cato to 1. study and understand why this has happened, and 2. explain that to the public and warn them of the dangers of piling more intervention on top of previous intervention.
This was filling up with lots of obnoxious comment spam from, well, an obsessed person with access to personal information (not about me, but about others), which he was spilling all over the site. So, unfortunately, I’m disabling comments.