Bring on The New Progressive Era
The new financial reform law calls upon government experts to make “heroic judgments,” complains David Brooks.
That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.
Although Brooks ridicules the notion that government experts could better spot a bank about to go under than the bank’s owners/managers, that happened about 20 months ago — not exactly the mists of time. And he does skirt the fact that the owners/managers had a great deal of money riding on hiding the truth that they were going under.
If we had government experts to force an orderly liquidation of big institutions on the brink and threatening the health of the financial system, we would not be paying right now for their bailout. By “we” I mean the taxpayers.
Brooks says with accuracy that a new progressive era is upon us. It’s not a liberal era where money is being redistributed. It’s a period in which “a large class of educated professionals” is being hired to analyze and make rules. In Republican shorthand, he’s talking about an “educated elite” tellling the rest of us what’s what. And the rest of us are supposed to resent that.
Bull.
In the early 1900s, patent-medicine companies were selling “cures” to the poor that were little better than (and sometimes were) poison. They filled their bottles with such ingredients as sulphuric acid, cocaine and booze, and sold the results as miracle medicines. The con artists getting rich off this waved the socialism word at journalists or scientists trying to expose the dangerous fraud.
In 1905, a pure food and drug bill was introduced into the Senate. Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, a model of corporate-bought corruption, fought against the bill as “bureaucratic.”
May the New Progressive Era commence.
Tags: politics, progressives, Rhode Island
