Republicans, free markets, and intervention

Ron Chernow, author of the biography I read this past spring on Alexander Hamilton, is quoted in the IHT this morning:
"We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams."


So the question has to be raised, to what extent can the current problems on Wall Street be tied to the current administration and what implications does this situation have for the Republican economic philosophy?

Comments

ninepoundhammer said…
This economic catastrophe has been a long, long time in the making. A long-term cause is the removal of our monetary system from the gold standard in 1971 (thank you, Dick Nixon) a near term cause is Alan Greenspan's radical expansion of credit and the money supply and arbitrary manipulation of the credit rate.

However, it has been a gradual turn in economic/ political philosophy until, as Nixon said, 'We are all Keynsians now.'

You should know from your recent reading that it can, for all intents and purposes, be traced to Hamilton. I would recommend Thomas DiLorenzo's new biography of Hamilton (http://www.amazon.com/Hamiltons-Curse-Jeffersons-Revolution-Americans/dp/0307382842/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221859511&sr=1-1). I haven't read it yet, but his 'The Real Lincoln' was great.

Viva Austrian Economics!

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