WRONG AGAIN: LEFTIST ECONOMIST BLAMES $4 GAS ON THE FREEMARKET

NYTIMES BOOK REVIEW:

From Free Markets to $4 Gas

By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
Published: September 26, 2008

As markets tumble and prices soar, and especially as the wages of ordinary workers lag inflation, the free-market dogmas that have governed the country over the last generation are increasingly under fire. If markets are so good, how come we’re paying almost $4 for gas?

...

Comes now James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, to denounce and, he hopes, to refute just about everything you thought was true about the virtues of private markets. In “The Predator State” Galbraith argues that the Reagan revolution and all that followed was essentially a fraud. What remains of it? Nothing. Who still believes in it? Outside academia: no one.

Galbraith says Reaganism was founded on three policies: deregulation, monetarism and low taxes. He declares that the first was an artifice so that lobbyists could extract “more money from those who can afford to pay — and sometimes from those who cannot.”

Monetarism (the tactic used, successfully, by the Federal Reserve in the 1980s to nip inflation) he depicts as a tool to kill off labor unions and elevate the power of Wall Street. And low taxes failed to achieve their supposed purpose — encouraging saving. They were merely a sop to the wealthy.

THE PREMISE IS ALL WRONG.

• THE REAL REASON WE HAVE $4 GAS IS THAT 80% OF THE WORLD'S OIL SUPPLIES ARE CONTROLLED BY STATES (AN THIS IS SOCIALISM NOT FREE MARKETS!) - LIKE VENEZUELA, IRAN, RUSSIA, SAUDI ARABIA NIGERIA AND SO ON...

• AND THE LEFTIES IN THE USA HAVE - UP UNTIL NOW - PREVENTED US FROM DRILLING HERE!

• IF OIL SUPPLIES WEREN'T CONTROLLED BY STATES, THEN GAS WOULD BE A BUCK A GALLON.

• THE FANNIE MAE FIASCO WAS CREATED BY INTERFERING WITH THE FREE MARKET; SOCIALIST SOCIAL ENGINEERING CREATED THE SUBPRIME AND ALT-A LOANS WHICH LIE AT THE HEART OF THE FIASCO.

• AND THIS ALL PROVES THAT WE NEED MORE FREE MARKETS NOT LESS.

• WE CERTAINLY DO NOT NEED MORE OF THE LIBERAL GALBRAITHIAN CRAP WHICH GOT US HERE!

• BTW: THE REVIEWER THINKS GALBRAITH IS WRONG, TOO!