McCain and Obama - both want free markets when we need regulation

How Free Should a Free Market Be?

By ALEX BERENSON
Published: October 4, 2008
Is this the end of hypercapitalism?


For nearly a generation, the United States has driven growth by deregulating markets, lowering tax rates and promoting trade. Across wide swaths of the economy — from airlines to banks to energy to telecommunications — Washington stood aside, believing less regulation would produce broad prosperity, even at the cost of greater income inequality.

Now, with Washington setting aside $700 billion to bail out financial companies, the economy weakening daily and the Democrats likely to enlarge their majorities in Congress, it may seem that the United States is shifting away from faith in markets and distrust of government.

In Europe, some political leaders, including conservatives like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, have declared the death of laissez-faire economics. “A certain idea of globalization is drawing to a close with the end of a financial capitalism that imposed its logic on the whole economy,” Mr. Sarkozy said last month. “The idea that the markets are always right was a crazy idea.”

What about America? In one sense, the present crisis would seem likely to continue the retreat from the free-market ideas associated with Ronald Reagan and President Bush suggested by the passage of the Medicare drug benefit plan in 2003 and the failure of Mr. Bush’s proposal to privatize Social Security in 2005, the centerpiece of his vision of an “ownership society.” Then, in 2006, Democrats took Congress for the first time in 12 years.

Whoever becomes president in January, lawmakers will be under pressure to strengthen financial regulation and give more resources to agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, which have appeared overwhelmed in recent years. Some critics of the bailout legislation complain, for instance, that at the same time that it empowers the Treasury Department to buy hundreds of billions in troubled debt from financial firms, it fails to fortify oversight of the nation’s financial system.

But Americans are fundamentally suspicious of government in a way that Europeans are not, a cultural and political difference that stretches back centuries. Anyone expecting a major expansion of Washington’s powers after November — whether under a Barack Obama or John McCain administration — may be disappointed. - read more at nytimes.com