Thomas Frank Looks for Wisdom in all the Wrong Places

My financial guru turned me on to this WSJ article by Thomas Frank about how 2008 showed that the market wasn't so wise after all.

As I read the last tranche of disastrous news stories from this catastrophic year, I found myself thinking back to the old days when it all seemed to work, when everyone agreed what made an economy go and the stock market raced and the commentators and economists and politicians of the world stood as one under the boldly soaring banner of laissez-faire ...

But something went wrong on the road to privatopia. If everything is for sale, why shouldn't the guardians put themselves on the block as well? Now we find that the profit motive, unleashed to work its magic within the credit-rating agencies, apparently exposed them to pressure from debt issuers and led them to give high ratings to the mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew the economy to pieces.

And so it goes. Free market capitalism failed us. We would have done better if we just would have regulated it more. If only we had watched the henhouse more carefully, the hens would still be there, laying eggs for us all!

Who is this "we," Thomas? Would this be the same "we" that has a huge prison population, the majority of which came from single parents that "we" in our wisdom decided were morally equivalent to married parents? Is this the same "we" that has a savings rate near zero? The same "we" that just held an election between an economic illiterate and an inexperienced, statist nincompoop monitored by a journalism industry that is so fundamentally clueless about finances that their companies are all going bankrupt? The same "we" that values this more than this?

Just where did you expect this wisdom to come from?

Elections and markets are no wiser than the people that constitute them. I submit that a people who have run up a $10T+ debt, who do not respect marriage and who run screaming from even the tiniest amount of self-denial aren't going to make a wise anything, whether those people gather in markets of a few dozen Obama advisors or 350,000,000 ordinary Americans.

The problem isn't free market capitalism, Thomas. The problem is us.

Your homework for tonight is to read some Dave Ramsey and then read some St. Augustine. Come back and write about wisdom after that. At least then you'll have been exposed to the real thing.