The Free Press, Mankato, MN

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January 19, 2010

Your View: Government interventions hurt economy

Jon Kovaciny, Mankato The Free Press

MANKATO — In his Your View, published Jan. 10, Tom Maertens asserts that Republicans, especially Bush, were bad for the economy. I agree with him on that point, but the problem is unprincipled Republicans, not Republican principles.

As such, both parties are to blame: Democrats tax and spend, Republicans borrow and spend, and, thanks to their sugar-daddy Federal Reserve, both parties print and spend. This is an unsustainable course.

At least the Democrats are candid about their desire to grow government; many Republican office-holders are duplicitous. I’d like Bush and our past Republican Congress to explain how exactly the prescription drug expansion and various bailouts and “stimulus” programs fit into the Republican Party platform and their lip service to free-market principles.

If Republican voters are smart enough to stop nominating, electing, and re-electing bad Republicans, we might actually get some good, principled Republicans, as well as enthusiastic volunteers, committed donors, and voters who aren’t embarrassed to admit their party affiliation. In the long term, straight-ticket Republican voters have done more damage to the Republican Party than the Democrats.

Decades of market-distorting actions by Congress, along with the Fed’s artificially low interest rates, inflated the dot-com and housing bubbles and culminated in a crash. Our current Congress and Administration are furiously attempting to re-inflate the bubble, but we’re pretty well out of soap.

We are repeating the actions of Hoover and Roosevelt that turned the Crash of 1929 (itself a Fed-fueled bubble) into the Great Depression.

Left alone, the market will deal with problems and recover rapidly, as it did during the severe yet short-lived Depression of 1920-21. Instead, our government persists in reverse-Darwinist actions that prolong our suffering.

 

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