United Socialist Republic of America

Fabius Maximus argues that the nationalization of financial firms is taking us down the road to socialism. Tyler Cowen notes that Europeans are crowing about the United States embracing more and more state control of the economy.

I've said before that those libertarians and free-market conservatives who supported George W. Bush will have a lot to answer for. How can we blame the public for associating the free market with the policies of the Bush administration when so many alleged defenders of the free market were associated with Bush and his policies?

Yes, some free marketeers opposed Bush on some measures. But how many self-styled libertarians served in his administration, how many gave money to him and to other Republicans, how many editorial pages which claim to support free enterprise endorsed him for president, how many supported his interventionist foreign policy?

And it didn't start with Bush. For more than 30 years, the free market movement has been intertwined with the Republican Party. If the GOP'a policies fail, then it discredits defenders of the free market as well, and frankly, those who were ever a part of it deserve to be discredited. It's a shame they will discredit the rest of us.

Tyler writes:

The economic fallout from these events is dominating the headlines. The intellectual and ideological fallout we are just beginning to contemplate.

I fear he is right.