LETTER TO WALL STREET JOURNAL

How sad that Alan Blinder, “When Greed Is Not Good” (Jan 12), so mistakes Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ as somehow being comparable to the leaden ‘Corrupting Hand’ of government. In describing the current financial crisis he mentions many causes, most of which he views as failures of the free market, but he fails to see how governments ‘Corrupting Hand” abetted, promoted or caused much of the dysfunction of the market. Politicians, regulators and bureaucrats are always convinced that they can nudge, fine tune or direct the financial markets to attain some utopian goal. And it always ends in disaster.

Always the solution is more regulation and meddling. Can we trust anyone who approves of the ObamaCare disaster creaking through Congress is a model for financial reform and regulation? If the Rube Goldberg contraption of ObamaCare is any standard, we should all quaver in fear of the same politicians and apparachiks laying their corrupting hands upon the financial markets.