I’d go so far as to say that the FM’s were worse than government – they were private enterprises backed by the government. I’ve long said that private-public hybrids are the worst of all worlds, because they combine all the worst elements of capitalism and socialism, with none of the public benefits of capitalism.

The only area of lax regulation that contributed to this was around the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie), but this can hardly be used as an argument for government intervention since the GSEs are nothing but massive globs of government intervention.

The other regulatory changes either helped the economy through the crisis, like Graham-Leach-Billey, which was a deregulation, or significantly enabled the bubble, like the adoption of the BASEL II rules, which was an increase in regulation.

In short, you won’t be getting a coherent explanation about how deregulation caused this because there is none. The coherent explanation is that this is entirely a failure of government, from the CRA encouraging bad loans to the GSEs enabling them, the Federal Reserve feeding the bubble with artificially supressed interest rates, to the adoption of new banking rules that changed how packaged assets were valued. It’s a chain of one government failure after another.

And for anyone who objects to me placing the Federal Reserve and Fannie/Freddie in the bucket of government, at the end of the day they answer to Capitol Hill and the clowns that infest it. If they answer to Captiol Hill, they’re government.

Now, I will concede that it is possible that the “right” regulations would have prevented the whole situation. The problem is that, to my knowledge, no one ever seriously proposed regulations that actually would have done so. This is not surprising, because regulations are inherently reactionary (at least in those instances where they are not brought about by “regulatory capture”), always seeking to solve yesterday’s problems. Regulators – and much more so Congress – lack the knowledge or understanding to be very good at predicting problems before they happen; even when they do foresee problems, they are not likely to be very good at assessing risks.

I realize this will fall on deaf ears, but I would like to know: (1) what aspects, specifically, of deregulation caused this mess; and (2) how, exactly, those aspects caused this mess. FWIW – I will concede that it is possible that some deregulation played a role, but I have yet to see a coherent argument to explain how deregulation played the primary role and was a bigger cause than, say, the FMs.

Sadly, though, some would claim that Weisberg– if not right about the issues– accurately captures public sentiment towards libertarianism.

This is a public sentiment about libertarianism created by his own faction, the MSM, so of course he’s right. So long as the media continue to either be ignorant of or flat out lie about the true causes of the problems in the world, they’ll be the enablers of the left. And I suspect they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Cogent analysis means nothing when the MSM has convinced the world that 2+2=5.