If it wasn’t bad enough that Alan Greenspan admitted having doubts about the power of self interest and Adam Smith’s dead hand to to regulate markets without interference from (gasp!) the governments of the world, now we have a Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund (the leader in promoting Disaster Capitalism the wonders of globalization and free trade for over fifty years) adopting the Keynesian heresy by suggesting that governments may need to provide more stimulus spending, not less, in order to save us from the Bush Depression. Oh the shame of it all! Poor Milton Friedman must be tossing and turning under his Free Enterprise tombstone today.
PARIS (Reuters) – Governments should be ready to increase their spending on economic stimulus programs if circumstances require it, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist Olivier Blanchard said in comments published on Tuesday.
In an interview with French daily Le Monde, Blanchard called on Germany in particular to boost its spending in the next few months as some of its European partners such as France have called for.
“The coming months will be very bad. Halting this loss of confidence, providing stimulus and, if necessary, replacing private demand are essential if we want to prevent the recession from becoming a Great Depression,” Blanchard told Le Monde.
Odd, isn’t it. We have had merry free marketers running rampant over the last three decades, waging war against the middle classes in all countries, spreading the wealth of nations to the wealthy only, a binge of unfettered free market excess which they, with their ideological blinders, championed and benefited from after Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes (and since 1994 conservative majorities in Congress) dismantled, piece by piece, the edifice of New Deal institutions which had saved our economic bacon once upon a time.
Yet now that their dreams of an unfettered capitalist utopia have all come to naught, to whom do they turn as their savior to lead them out of the hell of economic collapse into which their own misguided and foolish doctrines led them? Why Beelzebub himself: John Maynard Keynes. The very man whose policies they have savaged ever since he first came to prominence during the 1930’s. The irony would be delicious if so many of us were not suffering, losing jobs, losing homes, losing health care and in some cases literally losing our lives as a result of their destructive actions.
Still, I’m sure it’s only a temporary pause in the greater conservative movement to return us all to the paradise of Economic Feudalism the rule of Robber Barons Free Markets forever. But in the meantime, oh governments of the world, can you spare a few trillion dollars, yen, euros, pounds, et cetera, to help steer our dear capitalist leaders back to the promised land? And please, whatever you do, don’t get the idea you can try to tell us how to run our businesses. Just show us the money, and don’t ask any unnecessary questions about what we did, or plan to do, with it. Especially, don’t question the need to use those funds to brighten the lives of our senior executives this holiday season. That would be so gauche, don’t you know.
Ps. On a personal note, our family medical crisis turned out to be less serious than we had at first imagined and all is well. So here I am again, back to bore you with my meandering musings on the state of — everything. Aren’t you the lucky duckies?