MILHOUSE, BARRY AND THE FREE MARKET ECONOMY

Ah, those heady days of "Dick Nixon.......Before He Dicks You" (Probably my all time favorite bumper sticker). We had a little inflation going on and the Dickster was worried about it. So he and his housepets in Congress (This was still the first term) decided to do a "Stabilization". For those of you scoring at home, that would be a wage and price freeze.

While kind of appreciating it (GI Bill, Wife, Baby), I thought it was stupid for two reasons. First, it simply masked what was happening in the "real" economy. The value of a dozen eggs didn't change just because the price was artificially frozen. Thus, the one measure of how the economy was actually doing was edited and nobody could really know. The second reason was it had the effect of the government picking winners and losers. A small, full service pharmacy had no chance to compete against a high volume, more automated pharmacy (remember, in those days, we just bought our drugs. There were no "copay" issues). I could choose to buy my baby's medicine from the pharmacy who explained carefully exactly what it was, how to use it and what to watch out for, maybe even suggested an OTC product that would work well with it. With the freeze, value added competition was out the door. So I mocked it while I benefited from it.

Now we have a less direct governmental incursion into the economy. Picking winning sectors (Oh yeah. In the TARP we actually picked the winning banks but that's another story) and influencing job creation by spending government money. It's not as ham-handed as the Dickster but it's a whole lotta disbelief in the "unseen hand of the Market Place" (Thank you Mr. Smiff).

Our democrat friends may think this is my Republican evil twin coming out but maybe I just bought all this propaganda growing up about competition and innovation being good and the market place (give or take a few necessarily regulated industries) being the best regulator of success and failure. I get sweaty palms about more than a trillion dollars of tax money flying out the door because real estate is settling on a new price point and unemployment is up. I get that we have reeducation of the work force issues. I get that we have access to medical care issues. I don't quite get why that means we have to get out this big a shovel.

My previous post was about the politics of it and I still think Tanning Bed screwed that up.

But I'm not for a Trillion Dollars in givebacks and public works projects. Barry deserves more respect than the Dickster, just for style points. Still, at the end of the day, the government is picking winners and losers and that's not what my gov't is supposed to be doing.

Barry, let my people compete! You're for an NCAA Football playoff, so I know you like competition. Don't be the Dickster.