So Sarko chimes in on the financial crisis with the following economically and historically illiterate remark:
Self-regulation as a way of solving all problems is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.
I hereby give Sarko an F.
In economics? In history?
Hell no, he’s not getting off that easily. The man doesn’t know how to use the phrase laissez-faire; I’m giving him an F in French.
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Right on!
Didn’t he use it as an American would?
So, whatever happened to the French liberal movement? How did it go from the country where the very term “laissez-faire” was coined, to where classical liberal ideas are almost non-existent?
A while back, Anthony de Jasay had an essay where he said that “in French ‘liberal’ is a pejorative word, often meant as an insult, and liberalism is a farrago of obsolete fallacies that only the stupid or the dishonest have the audacity to profess.”
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_09_3_7_dejasay.pdf
I don’t know if it’s quite *that* bad, but still, one wonders what happened.
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[...] In my previous post I explained how Austrian price theory renders both state-socialist central planning and free-market plutocracy unworkable; in the present post, I explain how Austrian price theory applies to boom-bust cycles in general and the present financial crisis in particular, and why those who blame the crisis on the free market have things precisely backward. [...]