Mark Thoma is a friend on Facebook. I am a regular visitor to his web site. I found this video on You Tube in which he expresses his thoughts on blogging and some other subjects. I think you will be impressed. I was.
James Pilant
Tag: Mark Thoma
Mark Thoma – Government Intervention Dead?
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.
Mark Thoma – The Lessons Of The Economic Crisis Of 2008
Mark Thoma is a distinguished academic. His take on the vital lessons the banking collapse and the poorly executed bailout are similar to my own.
The overarching lesson in all of this is that getting government out of the way isn’t always the best path to prosperity. The crisis should have taught us that government has an essential role to play in preventing problems from occurring in the economy, and in correcting problems when they occur despite our attempts to prevent them. But, unfortunately, due to poorly executed policy, political posturing, obstructionism in Congress, and ineffective rebuttal from the administration, that’s not the lesson that has been learned.
He maintains a largely academic web page, which is worth a read. He also has a Facebook page which I recommend you join.
This is an example of his rhetoric.
This man has full sized lectures available on You Tube. He is an expert on econometrics, but don’t worry he is not always that high on academic difficulty when he speaks or writes.
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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