If nothing else, this time of global financial crisis that we have entered is leading us to begin a thorough analysis of our situation in order to gain greater clarity. Everyone wants to know how it is that we got in this crazy mess. (The Dow dropped another 449 points today, with, if I am not mistaken, more to come tomorrow.)
A good example of this is Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post today. "Wall Street as we know it is kaput." And he goes on to give his succinct and interesting diagnosis of the reasons and a possible prognosis.
Wow. That's how much things have changed in a couple of weeks. Not even 9/11, which happened right down in the Wall Street neighborhood on Manhattan, managed to do that. This is a major league crisis. Can you even imagine what is going on in the offices of the U.S. Treasury in Washington? It's got to be like a state of war.
My initial take: extreme greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street and elsewhere, along with a total failure of oversight in the government regulators, such as Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, the Treasury Secretaries, the Congressional oversight committees, even the last several Presidents. This is a bipartisan disaster, undoubtedly. Both political parties have to share the blame.
What has got to be changed is the economic and political philosophy that allowed these attitudes and behaviors to become the bipartisan orthodoxy that couldn't be challenged. A philosophy that while claiming to be conservative is actually very radical, because it leads to such extreme results, like bubbles that collapse like dams and destroy so much in their path.
True conservatives are cautious, prudent, fiscally responsible, aware of risks, and strive to live within their means. True conservatives do not believe in unlimited growth, because that is not the way things work in the real world. As George Will, one of the most prominent American conservatives, wrote recently: "Bubbles will always be with us, because irrational exuberance always will be. Its symptom is the assumption that old limits have yielded to undreamed-of possibilities: The Dow will always rise, as will housing prices, and rapture about a running mate can be decisive in a presidential election."
In the real world, there are limits and rules imposed by nature, society, and God, that to transgress is eventually wounding or fatal. Wall Street and their political lackeys have been anything but conservative.
We need to recover a true moral, economic, and political conservatism in this country. Then we will truly have made the most of this crisis.
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