ECONOMY: Cato Institute & Libertarianism

Another full page ad in the new York Times this Sunday caught my eye. It was an ad by the CATO INSTITUTE, a libertarian think tank that believes in open market capitalism with limited government intervention.

The ad was signed by what appears, thousands of academics from all over the country. In the ad, they take President Obama to task for insisting that we need action by our government to help jumpstart the economy.

The CATO institute disagrees with president Obama and do does not believe that government spending is the answer out of our financial dilemma. They cite correctly, that Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt and their massive spending, did nothing to alleviate or end the Great depression. In fact, historians feel their actions really prolonged the Great Depression, like I have been reporting.

They also mention Japan and the “lost decade” in the 1990s where no amount of spending by the government made a difference.
The CATO Institute believes lower taxes, less regulation and the reduction of the national debt, will boost growth.

President Obama mentioned this stance in his first press conference and that he disagreed with doing nothing and allowing capitalism to just work its way out of this mess.

When people ask me if I think the stimulus package will do the trick for us, I have to demure because I don’t really know (no one does) and history tells us that it probably will not do what we want it to do; even Obama hedges his bets and says that we must try something just like Roosevelt did.

The projects in the stimulus package will perform necessary tasks (for the most part) and will help in the long run but will not create the JOBS and the DEMAND generated by those jobs to jumpstart our economy.

I will also add that I disagree wholeheartedly with removing regulations that CATO feels impede progress. I feel we allowed capitalism to be corrupted by unscrupulous people to the point that it no longer was an economic philosophy. If you twist the fundamental rules of an economic system, you no longer can count on that system getting back to health on its own; the basic rules of capitalism must be enforced or we have economic anarchy.