Stocks Soar on Pledges of New Capital

Is it just me, or does this headline taken from the New York Times suggest that the Stock Markets have embraced socialism?Stocks Soar on Pledges of New Capital

How odd is it to see the Stock Market, a bastion of capitalism, making so much hay in response to the announcement of direct investments by national governments in their banking systems?

What happened to those days of “government is the problem”? Is Reagan rolling in his grave? Have the capitalists all fled?

Or is it simply that the markets were never free and that they will always need government help to keep on the straight and narrow?

Anyway: there can be no starker rebuttal of free market philosophy than to have the home base of capitalism capitulate so easily and embrace the warm helping hand of … gasp! … government.

I shudder to think what Milton Friedman would say. Well not really, he was a fool. Still it’s nice to see the counter argument to his ideologically tainted work made so succinctly and so plainly by his own troops.

And by a Republican administration no less!

Ah! Happy days indeed!