On Big Banks, Big Businesses

In the video above, Sec. Clinton tells Steven Colbert that she’d let big banks fail. There’s something in her (briefly stated) position for a libertarian to admire, although other points to doubt. (I’d not urge breaking banks up, but would surely urge government to allow large banks or businesses to fail. Clinton, admittedly, is referring to banks alone.  No one, by the way, is talking about abandoning depositors’ insurance; that change is not needed to enforce market discipline in these cases.)

For Whitewater, there is also a huge irony in this: unlike so many proud, self-declared conservative officials in this town, it’s actually Sec. Clinton who here takes the position of (implicitly) favoring the market over government rescues.

Clinton’s not a conservative, of course, but the contrast shows that Whitewater’s conservative officials are almost uniformly big-government conservatives, flacking every last dime of spending they can.

A genuine, small-government conservative official in Whitewater has much in common with a needle in a haystack.

Worse, their idea of big-government is toadying to the biggest businesses in the community. Ignorant or indifferent to sound economics, and consequently disdainful of free markets, they’ve nothing but the buzzwords of so many striving, scheming new men.

Whitewater’s economic development officials will develop nothing more than bad ideas and stale rhetoric so long as they embrace economic manipulation on behalf of their favored establishments.

These town squires are so lost that the leading Democratic candidate for president, the member of a party that enthuses over economic intervention, still shows a better grasp business intervention than they do.

That’s a whole new order of being lost, an extreme condition in which even the smartest St. Bernard, with the most developed senses, would be of no help.