Monday, October 31, 2011

Demo Sen. Dick Durban: Congress should “Design The Economy”


President Obama is attempting to frame the 2012 election as a battle between fat-cats and the rest of the country. The real issue of 2012 is control. Should the government control businesses, the economy and our lives or should we have capitalism, free markets and personal accountability?

Via Beltway Confidential:
With the public weary of bank bailouts, stimulus packages, and the federal loan program that produced the Solyndra scandal, Democrats still believe that Congress should play a major role in shaping the economy — with the help of expert planners, of course.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., acknowledged as much when he accused congressional Republicans of “simply standing back while trying to design the bumper sticker for the 2012 election instead of designing the economy to put Americans back to work.” Durbin said this during an interview with the Chicago Tribune.

Durbin’s suggestion that Congress should “design the economy” gets to the heart of a pragmatic disagreement between Republicans and Democrats on matters of economic policy. Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek explained that economic central planners do a much worse job of “designing the economy” than the decentralized “planners” of the free market — small businessman and consumers, for instance — who make personal economic decisions based on much more complete information. Central planners, in contrast, lack the knowledge to make good decisions for everyone.

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