Saturday, October 04, 2008

Arnold Kling: Bailout Worse Than You Think...

Someone I know referred me to this blog post critical of the bailout by well-known economist Arnold Kling, who coincidentally also was at Swarthmore College when we were there, a senior when we were freshmen...
No major newspaper would run any op-ed from me. I gave up and sent one to American.com, which you can see here. The bottom line:

The financial bailout isn't as bad as Main Street thinks. It's worse.

I think I'll just paste the other one below the fold.

Next, I am going for a long bike ride. You might want to look up a quote from August 1914 about "the lamps are going out all over Europe. We will not see them lit again for a long time." I'm sure a commenter will be able to locate the exact quote and the speaker, an English minister whose name eludes me.

Much of Europe was happy and optimistic when war was finally declared. Many people are happy today that war that has been declared on free markets. Looking at the bright side, it could be worse. This war does not involve sending millions of young men to fight in trenches and launch human wave assaults against machine guns.