Sunday, April 17, 2011

Stiglitz on "Market Fundamentalism"

The nasty Joe Stiglitz now makes this absurd statement:
The date Lehman Brothers collapsed may be to market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.
First of all, I am apparently not in the know, since although I had my suspicion, I was not certain what "market fundamentalism" was. My suspicion turned out correct. According to Wilkipedia:
Market fundamentalism (also known as free market fundamentalism) is a pejorative term applied to an exaggerated religious-like faith in the ability of unfettered laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems...Users of the term include adherents of interventionist, mixed economy and protectionist positions, as well as billionaires such as George Soros, and economists such as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz
Given his comment above, apparently Stiglitz holds the view that free market supporters, fundamentalist and otherwise, believe that businesses can not fail. Any supporter of free markets that I am aware of considers it a profit and loss system, where businessmen who attempt to provide services but lose money are as much a part of the process of the free market system as those that make money. Losses are a signal in the free market to change direction, to do something else. Thus, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy would not be a problem for a free market advocate. It would be a signal to businessmen that highly leveraged, derivatives trading is not the way to go (or certainly not in the manner that Lehman conducted its trades.)

Second, the funds available to leverage in the manner that was done by Lehman were available only because of Federal Reserve money printing. It would not come as a surprise to free market supporters that there would be a Lehman Brothers type crisis, given the manipulation of interest rates, money flows and money supply conducted by the Federal Reserve.

Stiglitz is one confused dude.

3 comments:

  1. These people are just ridiculous. If they can actually put the reefer down for just one moment and actually think about the history of America these past 200 years or so, they might notice a bit of actual reality. They might see that, when there was more freedom - i.e. fewer armed State intrusions into people's lives and economic matters - there was more growth, productivity and prosperity. And when there was less freedom - i.e. more State intrusions into private economic matters - there has been less growth and less prosperity.

    This is especially true with government's intrusions into Americans' right to free exchange, with the Federal Reserve and the government's compulsory monopoly over the people's money. The U.S. actually grew far more throughout the 2nd half of the 19th Century, before the Fed began its intrusions, in terms of the industrial boom and the freedom that allowed such a boom to occur and the raised standard of living of most if not all Americans. But, since the Fed, what has actually grown has been government, while our freedom has dwindled, and Americans' standard of living has been stunted by the Fed's intrusive mistakes and the growth of government.

    There is no "religious-like faith in the ability of unfettered laissez-faire or free market economic views or policies to solve economic and social problems" - only historical facts, common sense, and a yearning to be free, prosperous, and to get the vicious, criminal, thieving State the hell out of our lives.

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  2. Stiglitz and his ilk hate liberty. They might as well be denouncing "liberty fundamentalism" because that's all a free market is -- liberty.

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  3. How's the Murphy-Krugman debate coming along? Once we get the funds raised for that maybe we can pitch a Hendry-Stiglitz debate, round 3 (or 4 or whatever it is now), this time a good, hour long ass-stomping of Shitlipz by the Heroic Hendry!

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