The Hoover Institute’s Peter Schweizer has a good post in USA Today on the theme I’ve been covering: how Barack Obama’s policies help the biggest businesses at the detriment of the free market–which means at the detriment of the economy, small business, taxpayers, and consumers:
President Obama’s proposed reform of Wall Street calls for creating a list of large financial firms (“Tier 1 financial holding companies”) that will be officially designated as “too big to fail.” They will, in short, be guaranteed rescue by taxpayers if they get into financial difficulty. This will be disastrous because it will encourage further speculation and saddle taxpayers with the cost of cleaning up future trillion-dollar financial messes. The simple fact is that this sort of big government coddling is what got us into this mess in the first place. Wall Street is not a bastion of free-market laissez faire capitalism.
And here’s Schweizer’s thesis statement, which I cannot endorse enough:
There is a huge distinction between being pro-business and pro-free market. The Obama administration is being pro-business because it is proposing to prop up individual firms at taxpayer expense. What it should be doing is being pro-free market, which means encouraging greater competition and letting fools fail.
[Via Hit & Run, reason.com]
