Making the Grade

Sarkozy So Sarko chimes in on the financial crisis with the following economically and historically illiterate remark:

Self-regulation as a way of solving all problems is finished. Laissez-faire is finished. The all-powerful market that always knows best is finished.

I hereby give Sarko an F.

In economics? In history?

Hell no, he’s not getting off that easily. The man doesn’t know how to use the phrase laissez-faire; I’m giving him an F in French.

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4 Responses to Making the Grade

  1. Richard Hammer October 7, 2008 at 8:32 pm #

    Right on!

  2. Sheldon Richman October 8, 2008 at 6:45 am #

    Didn’t he use it as an American would?

  3. Joel Schlosberg October 12, 2008 at 4:21 pm #

    So, whatever happened to the French liberal movement? How did it go from the country where the very term “laissez-faire” was coined, to where classical liberal ideas are almost non-existent?

    A while back, Anthony de Jasay had an essay where he said that “in French ‘liberal’ is a pejorative word, often meant as an insult, and liberalism is a farrago of obsolete fallacies that only the stupid or the dishonest have the audacity to profess.”
    http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_09_3_7_dejasay.pdf
    I don’t know if it’s quite *that* bad, but still, one wonders what happened.

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. The Art of the Possible » Blog Archive » Regulation: The Cause, Not the Cure, of the Financial Crisis - October 10, 2008

    […] In my previous post I explained how Austrian price theory renders both state-socialist central planning and free-market plutocracy unworkable; in the present post, I explain how Austrian price theory applies to boom-bust cycles in general and the present financial crisis in particular, and why those who blame the crisis on the free market have things precisely backward. […]

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