Kevin_Kennedy
Defend Liberty
- Aug 27, 2008
- 18,553
- 1,923
- 245
No supporter of the market economy could have been surprised when the recent financial crisis was inevitably blamed on capitalism and deregulation. The free market, we were told, was a recipe for financial instability. Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire economic policies, wrote Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and author Eric Schlossel, in September 2008.
It is not enough to call this a distortion of the truth. It is a grotesque distortion, worthy of the Soviet politburo. The crisis is in fact the altogether predictable fruit of massive government and central-bank distortions of the economy. That may be why the free-market economists of the Austrian School were practically the only ones to have seen it coming.
Intervention and Economic Crisis by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.