With all of the blaming of our current economic failures on capitalism and the free market (a false blame of course), this quote from Peter Schiff at the 2009 Henry Hazlitt Memorial Lecture is priceless…
“President Bush in one of his speeches said that, ‘Wall Street got drunk’ and he was right, they were drunk. So was main street, the whole country was drunk. But what he doesn’t point out is, ‘Where’d they get the alcohol?’ ‘Why were they drunk?’ Obviously Greenspan poured the alcohol. The Fed got everybody drunk. The government helped out with their moral hazards; the tax codes and all the incentives and disincentives they put in — all the various ways that they interfered with the free market, and removed the necessary balances that would have existed and would have kept all this from happening.”
If you’ve been around my blog for any length of time, you know I’m a fan of Peter Schiff. He’s got a very common sense approach to economics and he can put things in terms that most people can understand. It’s hard to laugh about such an economic catastrophe, but Peter does an excellent job leading us down the road of how we got here, and how it should have surprised no one, plus he does it in a humorous way. Remember, he’s the guy who was trying to warn people this was coming well before it got here. Meanwhile everyone was laughing at him. The full video is about an hour and 20 minutes long, but it is well worth the watch. Especially if you really want to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
