<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-henwood-doherty19-2008dec19,0,3777089.story
>.
I'd post the text, but I don't want to undermine their traffic figures.
But here's my conclusion:
> Most of what I've written over the last few days is about the short-
> term strategies of addressing a profound economic crisis. But there
> are some long-term considerations as well. One that immediately
> comes to mind is a fundamental re-thinking of our market-driven,
> finance-centered economic model. It's badly broken.
>
> Brian, I guess that you would attribute this to too much government
> interference, but I doubt many would find that persuasive. Since the
> government is getting so deeply involved in rescuing a private
> sector that screwed up badly, we could actually do something
> meaningful with that intervention, such as creating new, publicly
> owned or cooperative banks. If we're bailing out the auto industry,
> the government could require equity for the workers and give them
> seats on the boards of their companies.
>
> The "free market" era is over, but you'd hardly know that from our
> political discourse.
and Brian's opening:
> Doug, since you have larger interests beyond just the political
> wrangling and policy decisions of today -- figuring out ways to
> squeeze our way through any given crisis with whatever expedient can
> be pulled out of a hat or with whatever money can be borrowed or
> squeezed out of the American people -- I'll step back here to some
> larger issues of political economy, the type of big-picture issues
> that your intellectual influences like Karl Marx and my intellectual
> influences like Ludwig von Mises were concerned with.
Funny, Patrick doesn't think I'm a Marxist, but Brian does!
Doug