What a great coinage. That’s how Robert Reich describes our current economic model, as the bailouts spread:
Put it all together and at this rate, the government—that is, taxpayers—will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest. . . .It’s called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.
Too true. Painfully true, in fact. It’s not the sort of thing one usually hears from liberals (especially under circumstances in which even conservatives have been advocating big government spending), but that only makes his comments all the more important, and the warning they contain all the more urgent.HT: Jennifer Rubin
That’s exactly how this liberal sees it. We’re subsidizing failure with tax dollars and pretending it is capitalism. We’re saving capitalism from itself, and the end result will be, inevitably, around a trillion of wasted tax dollars and no lessons learned – except that if you start off rich, it doesn’t matter if you fail miserably and destroy people’s retirements, you’ll stay rich at the taxpayer’s expense.
Which should not be news to anyone.
No, it shouldn’t be news to anyone; I don’t think it is, really, to folks who’ve been paying attention. Reich’s way of putting it should really bring it home to people, though.