Yours Truly (Inter Alia) in The Freeman

The November issue of The Freeman's out, and among other things it includes:

Kevin Carson. "The Distorting Effect of Transportation Subsidies"

Sheldon Richman. "The Most Dangerous Derivative of All"

Nader aptly points out that corporatists portray themselves as free-enterprisers, which disarms some who truly value free markets and prevents the emergence of effective coalitions in opposition to the policy elite.

Charles Johnson. "There's Too Little Trust in Government?"

So when Dionne reviews a few headlines—the financial-market meltdown, the Gulf oil spill, the coal-mine explosion at Upper Big Branch—he suggests that “It’s hard to argue that the difficulties we confront were caused by an excessively powerful ‘big’ government.”

Really? Let’s try.

“Deregulated” Wall Street collapsed in 2007 after years of unsustainable bubbles and malinvestment by a handful of immensely powerful big players. The real crisis was not just the “crunch,” but the shell game and misallocation that preceded it. The shell game flourished through a private-public partnership between government central banking, cartelized financial industry incumbents, and the industry-connected regulatory enforcers of the government money monopoly. The crash certainly revealed powerful corporations acting recklessly. But how did they get so powerful, and why were they willing to take those risks? Because government has, for decades, as a matter of policy, encouraged their dominance, invited their investments, subsidized their loan markets, put them near the inflation spigot, and subsidized their risk-taking with the promise of tax-funded bailouts. In a freed market, “deregulated” Wall Street’s concentrated wealth and reckless business model would not exist.

James Payne. "Can Government Save Us From Manmade Disasters?" A beautiful response to by-the-numbers right-wing hatchet jobs on Rachel Carson.