Phil Gramm

Like many of us at CEI, it looks like my former boss Phil Gramm isn’t interested in helping anybody pretend that today’s financial crisis was caused by “deregulation.”

Money and credit in the U.S. have, of course, been tweaked, folded, sqeezed and re-tweaked by a central bank—the Federal Reserve—for almost a century. On top of that, if cable news and talk radio are any indication, few seem to be forgetting that the collapse is largely rooted in a failure of welfare-statism—the artificial stimulation of housing markets over and above what free markets could, in reality, sustain.

The article is called “A Deregulator Looks Back, Unswayed.” It’s written in the faint-praise mode, with references to childhood in Georgia offset with an air of condescension and looky-here come-uppance, with quotes by detractors conveying to the reader that, gee, successful deregulation efforts like Gramm-Leach-Bliley kinda backfired and were largely this guy’s fault. But, no. All capitalism is meant to do is help facilitate wealth creation among strangers; we still have a long way to go—especially now with the collapse of investment banking in America. Along with it’s evolution of wealth-creating instruments, the private sector must evolve disciplinary ones as well (See Friedrich Hayek’s New Confusion About Planning” sorry, no link–hit the library, folks!).

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