Livin' In the 80's: George Will and the Politics of Denial

George Will is one of the most well-known columnists in American media.  I've been reading this guy's op/ed columns--sometimes with my teeth in grinding mode--for about thirty years in newspapers or in "Newsweek" magazine.  He's appeared on ABC News as an analyst for about the same time.   

I even read his baseball book, "Men at Work", which was pretty good.  He even won a Pulitzer Prize. The guy can write.  The problem lately with Mr. Will is that he can't seem to see what's happened in the past year has made a lot of his economic assumptions plain wrong. He's stuck in Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" of 1985 and mentally can't get out.

Poor George: still worried about America's encroaching "regulatory state" that pretty much died off in the 1980's and, as far as business was concerned, has been moribund since Bill Clinton and especially George W Bush called off the dogs on Wall Street to cash in on more campaign funds for their long-term career interests. 

George Will apparently fears the  Obama Administration coming into power on January 20th and, O Zounds!, actually making corporate bankers, Wall Street Lawyers, hedge fund managers, and other big timers play by the rules that were established 75 years ago by such watchdog groups as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department's Anti-Trust Division etc.    

 It's been the lack of regulation--not a surplus of it--that has contributed to the worst economy for stocks and houses since the early 1930's.  You'd think Will has been around long enough to see that. But, as my mother said, "there are folks who can look at a full-grown bull and not see he's got horns."

Here's a clip of my subject back in March of last year, giving out his "let 'em eat cake" economic formula on ABC's "This Week" Sunday chat show.  The guy trying to set him straight is this year's Nobel Prize Winning Economist from Princeton University, Paul Krugman: 

     

Poor George.  Despite the fact that he reportedly went to Oxford University in the 1960's--the better perhaps for a future war hawk to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam Era military--he can't tell the difference between a regulated liberal/progressive mixed-economy and "command and control" one-party authoritarian socialism. 

But maybe there is no difference in Will's World?  I guess by that logic he'd be against having traffic cops, stop signs and traffic lights around his gated-community near Washington because such "draconian" efforts that might lead to "command and control" by the state over anybody operating a car. This is an old fear in American politics and right now its one we need to put in context because the fear of regulation has led to its opposite disease: corruption from Washington and th business community (one in the same in some instances)  

The purpose of regulation--whether its to prevent speeders or drunk drivers or hedge fund crooks and shady adjustable-rate loan sell-offs to unsuspecting investors, is to prevent catastrophes.  

We are past that: the  econoimic meltdown has occurred, unemployment is up, credit is stagnant, major banks have failed, confidence by consumers is at a recorded all-time low. Is that due to over-regulation?

  And yet...and yet...to George Will, who's  most recent column referred to Obama as applying government-based "demand management" to the health of the economy, the danger is still the fear of Federal regulation.  The fact is that regulation is needed because it was out of use for too long during the Clinton/Bush Era.  It was given a bad name by the Reagan Administration and people took it to heart as a long-term rule.  It was denial then and its denial now.

If you wanted less regulation, you need all CEOs and others in power over billions of dollars to have  good ethical standards.  That didn't happen so here we are.

The Reagan Era is gone but some folks like George Will and his friends are still at the Gipper's Big Rodeo,  wondering what those big cows are with those pointy  things sticking out of their heads.