George Soros needs to crawl into a cave and stay there

Talk about having more money than brains. From Newsweek:

Converting the Preachers
George Soros launches a $50 million effort to purge economics of its free-market zeal.

"Large swaths of economics are going to have to be rethought on the basis of what's happened." So said Larry Summers, President Obama's chief economic adviser, in an interview in the weeks after the markets crashed a year ago. Yet to a remarkable degree, economic thinking hasn't changed very much at all.

Now financier George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of "free-market fundamentalism," among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees. He's also creating an "Institute for New Economic Thinking" to make research grants, convene symposiums, and establish a journal, all in an effort to take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades, and to correct the failures of decades of market deregulation. Soros hopes matching funds will bring the total endowment up to $200 million. "Economics has failed not only to predict and explain what happened but has also failed to protect society," says Robert Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who will direct the new institute. "That's what the crisis revealed. The paradigm has failed. There is no guidance."

It might be tempting to dismiss all this as a war of words among brainiacs. It's not. The critical issues being discussed in Washington about the future regulation and control of the financial industry�the very nature of Wall Street and the health of the economy�depend on this battle of ideas. What led to wholesale deregulation in the '90s and '00s wasn't just Wall Street lobbying money. It was also that key legislators and policymakers, among them Larry Summers, persuaded themselves that deregulation was sound economics and good policy, and that markets and Wall Street institutions could take care of themselves. Many of those views have been discredited by the crisis. But in the absence of a new paradigm of economics, confusion still reigns in Washington. With no new concept of the proper role of government and regulation in the economy, of the proper balance between the markets and their minders, the old school still dominates.

Emphasis mine -- phrases like: "the markets and their minders" make me reach for my revolver. These people are trying to coerce the United States of America into trans-Nationalism and that will be a cess-pit from which we will never return. This meddling has already been tried before on large scale and on small and it... has... never... ever... worked... Look at China, look at Russia, look at California and Massachusetts. Look all around and see the failure of governmental meddling. Our current financial woes were not a result of deregulation, they were the result of failed Clinton policies that should have been corrected but Bush didn't have enough muscle in Congress to make those corrections. People warned loudly and often but our employees in Congress sat back and worked on getting re-elected and not working for us.