United Liberty
Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is George W. Bush
Fri, 11/13/2009 - 12:32pm | posted by Doug Mataconis
Former President George W. Bush spoke in Texas yesterday:
Former President George W. Bush on Thursday warned that Washington is in danger of taking the country away from free-market principles in the wake of the recession, as he defended his decision to approve a Wall Street bailout package in the final months of his term.
The former president, who was outlining his vision for a policy institute to bear his name at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, warned that policymakers are taking government intervention too far in the wake of the rescue package — though he specifically omitted naming policies like the $787 billion stimulus package, the appointment of a “pay czar” to monitor compensation and increased intervention in the U.S. auto industry.
“As the world recovers, we’re going to face a temptation to replace the risk-and-reward model of the private sector with the blunt instruments of government spending and control,” Bush said. “History shows that the greater threat to prosperity is not too little government involvement but too much.”
Bush called his decision to back the $700 billion bank bailout one of the “most difficult” of his presidency.
“I went against my free-market instincts,” he said, explaining that he did so to unfreeze the credit markets and avoid a depression.
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This is pretty ironic coming from the same guy who increased non-defense discretionary spending at a faster pace than Lyndon Johnson, gave us the biggest increase in the welfare state in 40 years, increased federal intrusion into local decision making, and bailed out two auto companies that eventually went bankrupt against the will of Congress and the American people.
Leslie Carbone gets it right:
It’s arrogant and misguided for politicians to presume that government can “create the conditions” that foster prosperity. Freedom fosters prosperity, and freedom is natural; it needs no government to create it. Limited government is needed to protect the rights of those entrepreneurs and innovators and others so that they can create wealth. When government robs Peter to pay Paul, in other words, when it robs small-business owners and middle-class families to bail out big corporations, it undermines the very freedom on which prosperity depends.
Free market instincts ? Mr. President, your instincts were about as diametrically opposed to the free market as they could have possibly been.
I think Bush was saying that he acted against his pro-market instincts with all of the late 2008 bailouts.
Yes, I think that is what he was saying. If he were better read and more thoughtful, he could understand that the superiority of the market economy in meeting human material needs is not a matter of instinct but of principle and could have realized why such bail-outs are disastrous policy.
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