Friday, December 26, 2008

America's Lost Decade?

Great article on The Wall Street Journal today (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123007755316531663.html). It touches on the theme of FDR's Folly (a great book): government action made the Great Depression worse, not better. We are setting up to make many of the same mistakes again. Public spending on a massive scale, nationalization of big parts of the economy, public funds spent in uncompetitive industries with "Czars" assigned with no record of industry related experience performance to make sure the money is spent wisely (i.e., to further the political agenda of the Government), wasted money on infrastructure.
The title of the article refers to the lost decade in Japan after the real estate and equity bubble burst in 1989. The Japanese governement wasn't willing to let the economy take its medicine and kept many big companies and banks alive that should have been allowed to fail. They pumped shocking amounts of money into "infrastructure" to build roads and bridges to nowhere. I wonder how many more light rail projects we will have in this country as a result of our new new deal democrats $2trillion pubic spending?

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