Professor Thoma believes that the recent Republican election victories may well put an end to any government economic intervention. He argures tha the Obama administration’s bank bailout was badly done and called into question the government’s ability or intelligence to act economically.
Here is Thoma’s summation from the end of the article. Here he calls for intervention on the part of the government as a legitimate and vital choice.
I share that belief.
James Pilant
From The Fiscal Times –
Capitalism is the best system yet discovered for promoting economic growth, but it is also a system that creates large booms and busts along the way. The ability of governments to smooth economic shocks with monetary policy, fiscal policy, automatic stabilizers and social insurance is one of the great innovations of the last 100 years. While we have been far from perfect in the use of these tools, they have done far more good than harm, and it’s scary to contemplate a world where those protections have been substantially eroded away.
People should not be left to fend for themselves when they are hit by large negative economic shocks they had no hand in creating, and let’s hope that somehow, despite the emerging trend toward a more hands-off approach and pressures from rising national debt levels, that outcome can be avoided.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
I agree with Mark Thoma’s observation, particularly on capitalism. People must not be left to fend for themselves for democratic institutions must realize that People are the owners of all resources and the rest including the corporate and Government have only fiscal responsibility to answer and address the issues of Ethical Responsibility, People being the owners. Hence my observation: ‘Free enterprise is an expression of freedom, whereas Ethical Responsibility is an expression of liberty, that threshold values emanate to bridge Ethical and Fiscal Responsibility.’
Coming to the practical implementation of policies I wrote sometime back in: “7 Steps to Corporate [America] Governance http://wp.me/p18MVb-3h” A substance is the very essence of Governance measurement, a declaration of intent. Whether stimulus package or targeting of unemployment rate from current 10% to say 6%, a substance must be prepared as to how and what it is intended to do in the next 3 months or 6 months. A Leontief model may be the right one to create an input – output model as a Budget of cost consequence and the Governance Reporting herein mentioned as the Real-time monitoring of Accountability Statement that would guide the Corporate to a remarkable recovery. Substance makes Governance reporting very easy, simple with comparability universal as it is intangible.
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