The Death Throes of Laissez-Faire Capitalism?

In his Wall Street Journal commentary, Thomas Frank points out that "this catastrophic year" might have signaled the end of a time "when it all seemed to work, when everyone agreed what made an economy go and the stock market raced and the commentators and economists and politicians of the world stood as one under the boldly soaring banner of laissez-faire." Only a few short years ago "market triumphalism," had been achieved according to Thomas Friedman's "quintessential work ... "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," which announced in 1999 that "the deregulated way was irresistibly becoming the global way. It was a time when "Moody's Investor Service, a company that carried the awesome task of determining "which nation "is pursuing sound economics and who is not" based not on "political choices of which the market approved ... with its fantastic self-regulating powers. But something went wrong on the road to privatopia. If everything is for sale, why shouldn't the guardians put themselves on the block as well? Now we find that the profit motive, unleashed to work its magic within the credit-rating agencies, apparently exposed them to pressure from debt issuers and led them to give high ratings to the mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew the economy to pieces... it was not too long ago that simply everyone knew deregulation to be the path to prosperity as well as the distilled essence of human freedom... Today we stand at the end of a long historical stretch in which laissez-faire was glorified as gospel and the business community got almost its entire wish list granted by the state. To show its gratitude, the finance industry then stampeded us all over a cliff." And all we are left with after this glorification of over-ambitious acquisition fueled by one of the most common of human foibles; greed are a few half-hearted admissions of errors of market timing. Most remarkably, we are left to ponder the great wizard of the free market, Alan Greenspan, whose pronouncements from on high once held the world's unabated attention. His admissions of error provided little more than a mild form of ""shocked disbelief" on discovering how reality differed from holy writ." But what is most disturbing are the open admissions by "the free-market medicine men (who) seem determined to learn nothing from this awful year. Instead they repeat their incantations and retreat deeper into their dogma, generating endless schemes in which government is to blame, all sin originates with the Community Reinvestment Act, and the bailouts for which their own flock is desperately bleating can do nothing but harm. And they wait for things to return to normal, without realizing that things already have." Their endless optimism underlies their addictive nature and their collective inability to see beyond that next big score.