I’ve been struck recently by a theme that’s emerging pretty clearly from John McCain’s pronouncements on the turmoil in the markets. A couple of days ago, he railed against the “greed” and “corruption” that had poisoned Wall Street, going so far as to claim that those sorts of bad behavior caused “all of this fallout.” Today, McCain went further, saying that the chairman of the SEC, Christopher Cox, should be fired.
Notice a pattern? Everything’s the fault of the bad guys. It’s those greedy, corrupt traders on Wall Street. It’s the loser SEC chairman who was “asleep at the switch.”
Waaaah!!! Mom, those guys were mean to me! Make them stop!
McCain’s approach is completely juvenile. It reflects no understanding of what the real problems are. And this is no surprise, since for 20 years McCain has been a staunch opponent of just about any form of regulation of the financial markets. And yet, the markets have to be regulated. Unfettered, unregulated capitalism does not work, as we are learning this week. Imagine what would have happened had the United States government not nationalized Fannie, Freddie, and AIG, instead letting the markets take their course.
We may now be looking at a taxpayer-funded bailout of truly historic proportions — hundreds of billions of dollars of your money and mine used to buy up bad mortgages from banks and other institutions. McCain will no doubt be all for it. But he will never acknowledge — and in fact may not understand — that this situation came about because of him, or at least people who think like him when it comes to regulating financial markets.
