The House Passed the Reformed Bailout Bill: Joe Salerno’s Talk On The Crisis

Today is a day that should live in infamy, at least in economists textbooks, if not in the minds of the masses. Today is the day that the US Congress has nationalized much of our financial markets. The bailout (with the Senate’s 300+ pages of additions to the original House bill) was passed 263-171.

This isn’t a Conservative/Liberal or Republican/Democrat issue, this is an issue of real economics versus politics, and unfortunately, politics always wins. Politicians will never vote to decrease their own influence. They have always, and will always vote in line with the political machinery that gives them the most influence and power. There are, however, some who honestly believe that this bill is the right thing to do. They’ve been duped into thinking that by people like Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson, who are both Keynesian economists.

This is a great talk by Joe Salerno on this whole crisis.
A very good point is that what Salerno called a “vulgar Keynesianism” that still exists in politics, even though graduate economics students have been told for years now that Keynesianism is dead. His point is that Keynesianism is the economics of power, if not the economics of truth, and is the great enabler of government. Any economists who reject this outdated form of economics have been pushed to the side and ignored, which also explains why so many high level economists avoid politics completely. Highly recommended talk.