The past couple of weeks I've been being "unhelpful" by proposing an alternative strategy to the UK and US governments' bailouts even though in the UK our Front Bench team were clearly going to support the government and in the US I don't suppose anyone reads anything I write. Why did I bother? Here's why.
These bailouts will have the most profound implications for the future of politics. If those of us that are friends of markets and of light-touch regulation do not offer our own alternative analysis of the situation now and offer our own market-believing alternative strategies now then in the future, when the quid pro quo of the current bailouts arrives - utterly stifling regulation of banks, with the consequence of snuffing out most risk-taking (risk-taking being the core of capitalism), wealth taxes, and a greatly enhanced role of the State in the economy - those that are not friends of markets will rightly say to us: "Your programme is finished; it's destiny was widespread and unacceptable instability and the enrichment of the powerful and the deceitful at the expense of the hardworking and humble. Your system failed, the State had to rescue it, and there was no realistic alternative. We are the masters now and we will try things our way."
Since we have no power over events, those of us that are believers in Markets can only offer our own alternative analysis and state our own pragmatic solutions. That way, perhaps, we might argue later "But there was an alternative, and we offered it at the time."
