David Leonhardt has a good piece in this weekend’s upcoming Sunday Times Magazine on nationalization.Here’s a preview:
“Few words conjure the specter of radicalism quite so well as nationalization. Seizing control of large industries — nationalizing them — is often among the first acts of a leftist government. Lenin did it, and so did Hugo Chávez. Even the comparatively tame François Mitterrand made the nationalization of some banks and heavy industry the centerpiece of his agenda when he became France’s president in 1981. He held it out as the alternative to the laissez-faire ideology of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
So it is a bit odd to watch Barack Obama, who aspires to finally end the era of Reaganomics, spend his early weeks in the White House swatting away calls for nationalization from decidedly nonleftist quarters. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, recently said that, given the depth of the credit crisis, he wouldn’t rule out nationalizing banks. Alan Greenspan went further a few days later. “I understand that once in a hundred years this is what you do,” Greenspan, an Ayn Rand disciple before he was a central banker, told The Financial Times.
Graham and Greenspan were merely following the lead of various liberal and centrist economists who have been warning of the severity of the financial crisis over the past year. Only the government, their thinking goes, has the ability to remove the dead parts of the financial system so that the rest of it can start functioning again. But Obama and his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, aren’t interested, at least not yet. They want to give the private sector another chance to clean up its own mess. And that has made some people wonder whether it is now the left — or at least Obama’s Democratic Party — that’s too afraid of a little nationalization.”
The rest can be found here . . .
Graphic via NYT
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Source:
More Than One Way to Take Over a Bank
DAVID LEONHARDT
NYT, February 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/magazine/01wwln-lede-t.html
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