Thursday, October 2, 2008

Government: Big enough already

Quin Hillyer observes that, despite cries of "crisis," existing institutions are meeting the credit crunch adequately:
Without a greater accretion of power, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation stepped in to help stem the panic. So did the Securities and Exchange Commission. So did the Federal Reserve. All of them helped. And more can be done, within existing authority.
The point here is not to celebrate the bureaucratic state, but only to note that the bureaucratic state already is large enough and powerful enough to handle parts of this crisis. It doesn't need to get much bigger.
I would argue that how we got here in the first place is through the blunders of a too-big government that needs to be substantially reduced, but we can have that argument later. Quin's larger point -- that the alleged financial emergency seems not to require extraordinary intervention -- is solid enough.

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