Re: The best single summary
This [economic crisis] is a deep and very wide crisis - rooted in Americans' refusal to accept that in a globalized world, their free lunch is over. And so they borrowed for free lunches on the basis first of stock speculation and then real estate insanity - and the absence of any sober conservatism in fiscal and economic policy enabled them.
When you wrote “absence of any sober conservative ... economic policy”, you get right to the heart of the conundrum for a conservative political philosophy. The grounding values of “less government” and “free markets” make for easy philosophy, but it provides no framework for how to actually govern. What would be a “sober conservative economic policy” that would have regulated, taxed and limited the various interlocking pieces of investment banking, mortgage banking, insurance and so forth. It was, after all, the conservative philosophy of unregulated free markets that created the problem at hand by relaxing banking and allowing cross-holdings and not creating a payment system àlà the FDIC to provide a trust fund to insure the problems we are bailing out today.
Same conundrum for conservatives in solving the healthcare crisis: it is the very nature of the free-market for-profit lightly regulated insurance system that excludes as many people who might actually need the insurance, so their count swells, so how would more of it solve itself?
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