The left in a nutshell.
Via Beltway Confidential:
With the public weary of bank bailouts, stimulus packages, and the federal loan program that produced the Solyndra scandal, Democrats still believe that Congress should play a major role in shaping the economy — with the help of expert planners, of course.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., acknowledged as much when he accused congressional Republicans of “simply standing back while trying to design the bumper sticker for the 2012 election instead of designing the economy to put Americans back to work.” Durbin said this during an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
Durbin’s suggestion that Congress should “design the economy” gets to the heart of a pragmatic disagreement between Republicans and Democrats on matters of economic policy. Nobel prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek explained that economic central planners do a much worse job of “designing the economy” than the decentralized “planners” of the free market — small businessman and consumers, for instance — who make personal economic decisions based on much more complete information. Central planners, in contrast, lack the knowledge to make good decisions for everyone.
Durbin should have learned Hayek’s lesson when his amendment to the Dodd-Frank Bill, ostensibly to protect consumers from big banks, resulted in a new debit card fee for consumers to pay. And the miscalculations don’t stop with Durbin. Vice President Joe Biden, after proposing a bumper sticker slogan for the 2012 elections (don’t tell Durbin), blamed miscalculations by expert advisers for the failure of the stimulus to keep unemployment under 8 percent. He didn’t explain why Americans should trust advisers from the same Administration to commit still more taxpayer money to stimulus spending.