History will forget Bush's interventions just as it has forgotten Hoover's - as it has forgotten that Hoover signed the largest tariff hike in U.S. history; as it has forgotten that Hoover tried to create jobs by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans; as it has forgotten that Hoover signed the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation; as it has forgotten that, with the Revenue Act of 1932, Hoover raised the top marginal tax rate on personal incomes from 25 percent to 63 percent (in addition to raising the corporate-tax rate).
History will repeat itself, blaming capitalism for a problem caused and intensified by government interventions.
Furthermore, via O Insurgente, the editorial of the Washington Post(via Cafe Hayek):
Is this the end of American capitalism? As financial panic spread across the globe and governments scrambled to contain the damage, reality seemed to announce the doom of U.S.-style free markets and President Bush’s ideology. But this is wrong in two ways. The deregulation of U.S. financial markets did not reflect only the narrow ideology of a particular party or administration. And the problem with the U.S. economy, more than lack of regulation, has been government’s failure to control systemic risks that government itself helped to create. We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets.
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