After a while words mean what they usually mean. If everybody misuses a word, and they do so for several centuries, then they have successfully changed the meaning of that word. Words like conservative or capitalist get shanghaied, and there you are, left muttering that you didn’t really want to conserve the Great Society, and that you prefer capitalism, not this mutant crapitalism.
But let us deal with the substance, and not with the words. A free market means that you need to have the freedom to fail. If you don’t have the freedom to fail, then your economic transactions are answerable to some regulator or bureaucrat, and not to God. And, depend upon it, that regulator or bureaucrat will screw it up. God has built accountability into the world. He is not mocked. But if you insist on having the government step in every time somebody new is going to learn what comeuppance means, then you are at war with the concept of accountability.
But accountability is the word that the minions of Congress keep using. They are waving it around as though it sets up some kind of mystical aura of protection, which it actually does, for them. Insisting on accountability for others means that they can forestall . . . accountability for them. Very useful magic word.
We are told that we have to intervene because all these financial entities are “too big to fail.” But this simply assumes that for the Fed to step in this way is not setting us up for an even greater failure, down the road just a little ways. Virtually all government crises — including this one — are the result of the previous waves of reform that all the intelligent people were demanding. But having Congress oversee the economic markets of a nation like ours is like having a chimp disassemble your laptop computer for a little troubleshooting. Suit yourself. And when things go really badly, computer-wise, Nancy Pelosi will insist that the “next time this happens, we will take steps to ensure that the chimp repairmen are only allowed to use their thumbs.”
We really do get the government we deserve. In less than a month, virtually every elected lunatic that I have seen on the tube during this silly season will be returned to Congress, with loud shouts of triumph. If people were to ask me what we can do to survive the nine miles of bad road that appears to be just ahead of us, my advice would be this: cultivate, really cultivate, a deep and robust sense of humor. And that is not possible unless God is in His heaven.