Don’t Scapegoat Free Markets

Even the liberal Washington Post (which has endorsed the more liberal candidate in every presidential election since 1952) points out that the “free market” is not to blame for the recent financial meltdown — a point also made in the conservative Washington Examiner and the liberal Village Voice.

“The market that failed was not exactly free,” notes its editorial:

The deregulation of U.S. financial markets did not reflect only the narrow ideology of a particular party or administration. And the problem with the U.S. economy, more than lack of regulation, has been government’s failure to control systemic risks that government itself helped to create. We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets.