Robbing Peter to Pay Goldman Sachs, Big Government is Back

Awesomely Awesome Graphic From Rapture Ready Radio

So, I was sent to this luncheon for work hosted by the UN and the speaker was talking about sustainable agricultural practices and how to improve the environment in rural areas of developing countries. He stated that the development sector needed to stop acting on a "Soviet Union-type central planning" model and start thinking more about markets (i.e. making environmentally-friendly ag practices beneficial to consumers and what not). If the motherfuckin' United Nations recognizes that central planning might not always be the way to go, why is the United States reverting to a cross between the WPA and Mao's Great Leap Forward? Matt Welch has an article in the NY Post about the new era of big gummint started with Bush's TARP fiasco:

This isn't about liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. A majority oppose Obama's policies because they fly in the face of this country's bedrock values of personal liberty and limited government. Robbing Peter to pay Goldman Sachs does violence to that fundamentally American ethos.

And increasingly, Obama administration policy does violence to European values, as well. The continent has for the last two decades been systematically disengaging national governments from domestic industries. Top officials from Sweden, of all places, complained about Washington's auto bailout, tersely announcing that "The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories."

It's complete arrogance that any politician can manipulate the economy as efficiently and productively of the free market. John Stossel makes the point with health care that the free market is a representation of the wills, needs, and capacities of billions of people around the world, and what centrally-planned bureaucracy is going to be able to do that more efficiently? Certainly, I would argue that there needs to be government-run, central-planning models for institutions like the military (because of its unique purpose), but this whole concept that governments need to intervene in failing markets has proved a colossal dud these last 10 months.