Curse of the Centrist
Oct. 13th, 2008 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurY'know, perhaps the most annoying part of the whole economic crisis for me is the near-certainty of how severely I'm going to be Silverwinging about it in the coming years. I mean, I'm quite sure that short-term government intervention was necessary here, and that the regulatory framework needs beefing up -- the Republican extremists have torn things down rather too far in their free-market zeal. But I'm pretty confident that things are going to swing too far the other way now, and that within a year or two they'll have over-done the regulations, and we'll spend years peeling them back again.
Truth to tell, I'm not so worried about Obama: for all his supposed liberality, his main characteristic seems to be caution, and he's fond of well-measured plans. But I have faith that the congressional Democrats, given a chance to mess in the markets, will overdo it. Not that I want the Republicans in power at this point, either -- the fact that so many of them responded to this crisis with the usual empty mantra "lower taxes!", as if that had much of anything to do with the problem, shows how far they've diverged from reality. Indeed, I'm appalled at the refusal of so many of them to even admit that careless deregulation was complicit in this mess.
What I want is careful technocrats doing the minimal necessary tinkering. But even granting that Obama himself tends to that style, I don't think he's going to do much to rein in the likely tide of regulation...
Truth to tell, I'm not so worried about Obama: for all his supposed liberality, his main characteristic seems to be caution, and he's fond of well-measured plans. But I have faith that the congressional Democrats, given a chance to mess in the markets, will overdo it. Not that I want the Republicans in power at this point, either -- the fact that so many of them responded to this crisis with the usual empty mantra "lower taxes!", as if that had much of anything to do with the problem, shows how far they've diverged from reality. Indeed, I'm appalled at the refusal of so many of them to even admit that careless deregulation was complicit in this mess.
What I want is careful technocrats doing the minimal necessary tinkering. But even granting that Obama himself tends to that style, I don't think he's going to do much to rein in the likely tide of regulation...