Tuesday, October 28, 2008

" But at this point, that's all I've really got: priors."

Don Boudreaux with a sensible post on Cafe Hayek:

"There's been a rush to blame free markets, even laissez faire libertarianism, for the current financial crisis. As I -- and Russ -- have said before, there are lots of other potential culprits around. Hastily concluding that the culprit is the free market might be emotionally gratifying for many folks, but it's an intellectually corrupt conclusion.

Research perhaps will eventually reveal that free markets and deregulation are the main culprits. Or research perhaps will eventually clear these suspects of most or all such charges. Time will tell."

Here's my response:

I believe that the system of implicit and explicit government guarantees to intervene in a financial crisis like this is the most important cause of our current predicament, but not the only one.

I admire your attitude about looking at the facts to see how they match our theories, and agree with you about this.

Although we can all have our theories about how this came about, there is not enough evidence now to make grand pronouncements, one way or the other.

The are so many current oddities, like currency moves, that we have yet to really sort out.

Posted by: Don the libertarian Democrat | Oct 28, 2008 5:46:27 PM

Of course, portentous and grandiloquent claims make better headlines, and, like overdone controversy, spark hits and comments on blogs.

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