Anybody can play an April Fool’s Joke in April, but E.J. Dionne deserves credit for pulling a fast one on gullible readers in July. And I’m brave enough to admit that I was briefly fooled by his column asserting that even conservatives now recognize that free markets don’t work. It was only after thinking about his column that I realized he surely must be engaging in some leg pulling if the first person he quotes is one of the most collectivist‐minded members of Congress, Barney Frank. Dionne tries to trick readers by then citing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who (gee, what a surprise) is in favor of more regulatory power for the Federal Reserve, but he neatly avoids any explanation for why this is evidence that conservatives are abandoning markets (perhaps he is assuming that Bernanke is a conservative because he was appointed by Bush, but surely Dionne is not so naive):
Since the Reagan years, free‐market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing. …The old script is in rewrite. “We are in a worldwide crisis now because of excessive deregulation,” Rep. Barney Frank (D‑Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview. …While Frank is a liberal, the same cannot be said of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. …Bernanke sounded like a born‐again New Dealer in calling for “a more robust framework for the prudential supervision of investment banks and other large securities dealers.”
Wait a minute. Perhaps Dionne is writing a serious column. He quotes Irwin Stelzer of the Hudson Institute, who reasonably can be considered a conservative:
What’s striking is that conservatives who revere capitalism are offering their own criticisms of the way the system is working. Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute, says the subprime crisis arose in part because lenders quickly sold their mortgages to others and bore no risk if the loans went bad. “You have to have the person who’s writing the risk bearing the risk,” he says. “That means a whole host of regulations. There’s no way around that.”
Dionne seems impressed that Stelzer says that markets don’t work perfectly. But that is a reflection of Dionne’s unfamiliarity with economics. After all, failure, like success, is a part of the market process. Dionne does note, however, that Stelzer is endorsing more regulation, so there is a tiny shred of evidence for his hypothesis that conservatives want more government intervention. But if this is the evidentiary bar that has to be cleared for such assertions, I’m going to write a column saying that all socialists now support a flat tax. And I won’t even have to find one left‐leaning writer to “prove” my point. I can just point to the various socialist‐led governments in Eastern Europe that have adopted single‐rate tax systems.
Before signing off, I feel compelled to point out that Stelzer has a fair diagnosis but a misguided prescription. Yes, hindsight shows that lenders were cavalier about loans since they knew other investors would be the ones bearing the risk. But after absorbing billions of dollars in losses, investors obviously have a huge incentive to avoid the same mistake. Indeed, that is why failure plays a crucial role in a market economy; people learn from mistakes. Additional government regulation, by contrast, is at best a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. In the vast majority of cases, however, regulations throw sand in the gears and/or distort incentives for the efficient allocation of resources.
