Interesting article Chris.

“After all, the current economic crisis was caused by inadequately regulated capital and financial lending”…

You say this as if it were an established fact. But your own experience should have taught you at least to question it, for several reasons.

If the current economic crisis is the unintended consequence of policies intended for socialist reasons to re-distribute wealth, would governments admit it, or even understand it? Or would they try to externalize the blame? If that were the case, which line would humanities academics tend to follow - even if we looked at no more than the fact that they are government-funded, which is to say nothing of their socialist history and worldview? So a modicum of critical scrutiny is called for.

To suggest that the current economic crisis “is caused” by inadequately regulated markets, is to argue that monetary policy had nothing to do with a monetary crisis. A whole panoply of government institutions is set up to do nothing but manipulate the supply and the price of money, but apparently, that has nothing to do with the demand for money. Curiouser and curiouser. Can you really believe that?

Government currently confiscates, directly or indirectly, about 50 percent of what the nation produces every day. Now we already know that total government control of the economy can only lead to total economic chaos and collapse, and a society of privilege.

So what is being asserted, is that
a) the enormous control over the economy that government exercises through many departments, and which consists of nothing but intervening to rig prices to be different than they otherwise would be, has got nothing to do with the cause of the economic crisis; and
b) there is an optimum solution by central planning of the economy at an unspecified point greater than 50 percent and closer to the point of 100 percent and totally unsustainable economic chaos.

Time to consider a more parsimonious theory.

The modern state in a nutshell: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/026167.html

How political manipulation of the money supply causes economic crises: http://mises.org/story/3128

Keep up your inquiries!

Wing Ah Ling

About your discussion of my stated words, “After all, the current economic crisis was caused by inadequately regulated capital and financial lending”…

I merely put it in to highlight aspects of concern by critics of liberalism. I actually don't believe it, although the system can always be improved.

Should have made that paragraph clearer.

I guess it's a bit like the Economics paper in the HSC each year:

The questions are the same questions. It's just the answers that are different.

The problem I have with neoliberalism is that the advocates tend to be ideological zealots who argue that the market can solve all of the problems of the world and that market = good and government = bad.
This is patently ridiculous.
We then get the puerile retrospective justifications which try to argue that black is white and up is down.
So, on the causes of the sub prime crash and the Global Economic crisis was not rampant greed and a lack of regulation and oversight, but Governments legislating to allow people who couldn't afford housing loans to make those loans. It was all the government's fault!

So what you see as truth i might see as spin and probably vice versa.

Shai

You are right with your statement "what you see as truth i might see as spin and probably vice versa".

However, I do not defend liberalism just on economic issues. I defend liberalism on its ability to promote a plularity of ideas and to offer an ideology that has universal appeal in terms of the potential benefit of freer trade for competing nations struggling to find and accept common international instutions. This is what I am about. I have never suggested that freer markets are perfect, even when I wrote for Quadrant.

Chris,

i wrote on another thread that the apologists for neoliberalism sounded like the apologists for communism:

Back in the 1960s and 70s these apologists were arguing that communism worked its just that it hasn't been introduced correctly yet.

What we hear now is neoliberals bleating that the reason that the market failed is that it hasn't been introduced correctly yet, that governments didn't allow the market to flourish free of government interference.

The absurdity of both positions is obvious.

Freeing up the market was a necessary reform that needed to occur. However it's a means to an end not an end in itself.

On my dentist's roof there is a sign: Capitalism is where man exploits his fellow man. Communism is the opposite.

The problem is not with right or left, but with the uncritical acceptance of received opinions. There are plenty of fools and fanatics on both sides of politics, but we have enough information now to make our own decisions about the things that matter to us. Anyone who wants to hold an opinion on something should be obliged to find out the facts about it first; that will immediately cut down the bile and hysteria by 99%, and we can then proceed from there.