Yesterday (10/14/2008), President George W. Bush said to his audience: “These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it.”  He was referring, of course, to the U.S. Government’s injecting of $250 billion into banks in exchange for partial ownership (a stock buy-up, in essence).  In true Bush fashion, his statement is both a lie and laced with a profound ignorance.

In reality, there is no free market in the United States.  There is a quasi-private market, which is not even remotely the same thing.  No free market can run on state-monpolized fiat currency, protected from competition by armed threats and cages.  Actual free market proponents like the Austrians have been decrying U.S. economic policies for decades as antithetical to liberty, prosperity and common sense.  Now that the corporatist mini-regimes that have whored themselves out to government for as long as they’ve existed (and vise versa) are collapsing under their own weight, generations of steadily increasing state intervention in the economy have been strangely omitted from the bulk of public discourse.  Rather, recent events and the policies which led to this point are termed “market failures,” as opposed to the more accurate and redundant “government failures,” thereby opening the way for foolish tools like George W. Bush to claim that current activities which could not be more anti-free market are actually intended to “preserve” the free market, which just so happens to not even exist.

If Bush wanted to be more truthful, he could have replaced “free market” with “capitalism” or “corporatism,” yet he, like so many other politicians and their apologists, seems perfectly content in his fallacies and abject ignorance of economics.  Of course, government, like religion, is not in the business of discovering and propagating truth, but rather the business of selling a particular dogma and ensuring that the largest number of people possible believe in it, regardless of truth.

For more information on the current economic madness, I recommend “The Bailout Reader” at Mises.org.