Om ni vill ha ytterligare intellektuell ammunition mot de som påstår att finanskrisen bevisar att ”laissez-faire kapitalismen” är orsaken, då bör ni definitivt läsa George Reismans senaste artikel ”The Myth that Laissez-Faire Is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis”. Smakprov:

Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation [that the news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth of capitalism]. Thus one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”[2] Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”[3] In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”[4] Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”

The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire”—at least compared to the time of Stalin.

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