"Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump. It can hardly be asserted that the economic history of the last decades has run counter to the pessimistic predictions of the economists. Our age has to face great economic troubles. But this is not a crisis of capitalism. It is the crisis of interventionism, of policies designed to improve capitalism and to substitute a better system for it."
--Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922

An Italian historian and opponent of Mussolini, Gaetano Salvemini described fascist economics as believing that "profit is private and personal, loss is public and social." That fits the brave new world we are entering here to a Tee. And while what is going on is "socialist" too, I think it may fit the label of corporatist fascism better if Salvemini's description is accurate.

Think of it this way. Our leftist politicians tend to see profits as social and want redistribution (through extremely high progressive taxation, corporate, estate, capital gains taxes, etc.). What Bush and Paulson and company are trying to push through is more solely the socialization of the losses and not the profits. I would add though that I am getting mixed signals on what liberals are thinking nowadays, there seems imo to be a more general consensus between the middle of each party (say neo-liberal to neo-conservative segment of the political spectrum) along these fascist lines. That is agreement on lower taxes but still the socialization of losses.

Anyway, of course there is a third option and that is to stop making the economic (and the social) political. Or at least treating them as much much less so.

To stay with the more philosophical nature of Dan's "Worth Repeating" posts I want to ask Flynn-Filers, is a democracy capable of restraining itself from coopting the social or the economic into the political?

I should give credit to a blogger Steve Sailer mentions for the Salvemini quote I used. Online commenting makes plagiarism so hard to avoid . . .

That’s a perfect quote. This has unfortunately become a crisis of interventionism. Although, it’s not the first time and this particular problem has been building for some time now. You might say that Ludwig Von was prescient but he likely wrote that based on observations of a series of events prior to 1922. Soooo.....what have we learned?