Bush Sells Free Market as Cure-All, Despite Crash

clipped from www.progressive.org On Thursday, Bush gave a speech in New York about the financial crisis, and it was a laughable ode to the free market. Ever incoherent, Bush himself admitted as much. And so he enumerated the market interventions that his administration has already taken. He talked about the need to “make our financial markets more transparent”— though his bailout is anything but. And he even called for more regulation. “The greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market,” he said. “It is too much government involvement in the market.” This is economic idiocy at a time of global collapse, and to utter it, Bush had to distort the cause of the collapse, blaming a lot of it on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and denying that it was caused by “greed and exploitation” or “a failure of the free market system.” But that’s exactly what it was: A failure of cowboy capitalism. Deregulation come a cropper.