In reality, (and they hint of this in the article, but ignore it at the same time,) politicians want to get re-elected.

I.e. Kevin Drum talks about how quickly the government has responded to the economic collapse, but he hasn’t actually proven that the government has responded effectively or has done so in a way that won’t screw us in the long term.

They say “Legislators don’t take risks to fix long term problems” and you say “Legislators avoid risk and cause long term problems”. They are two sides of the same coin. How bout we say it this way: “Legislators take the easy way out, thus allowing long term problems to fester and allowing new problems to form.”

Unless the problem is “we can respond fairly well to short-term problems”, and in this case the “we” is the government. I think it has been shown through history that the government almost never gets it right.

The only solution is to remove control from the government and return the power to the people. I just wish there was an easy way to do that.

The reason politicians have difficulty with the financial crisis or recession is not because they’re “short-term” but because government created them in the first place and the tools they hope to use to fix them are the same tools that created them in the first place.

Two entirely different categories — a fact utterly lost on central planner wannabes like EK.