CAINSIAN ECONOMICS

http://www.tomwoods.com/blog/one-week-before-collapse-cain-says-economy-great/

ONE WEEK Before Collapse, Cain Says Economy Great

Amazingly, Herman Cain’s star continues to rise, which means Republicans think it’s all right for someone to endorse Mitt Romney, as Cain did, to support TARP (it’s not his fault, say supporters — he somehow had no idea it would be used to “pick winners and losers”!), and to be completely clueless about the condition of the economy right up to the moment of the collapse.

Now this really takes the cake: here is Herman Cain on September 1, 2008, saying the economy is in terrific shape.

Here’s what happened over the following two weeks:

– Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the U.S. government (Sept. 7);
– Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America;
– Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy;
– The Fed bailed out AIG;
– Washington Mutual was sold to JP MorganChase;
– Treasury Secretary Paulson said the economy was so bad that $700 billion must be spent on bailouts immediately; otherwise, warned Ben Bernanke, “we may not have an economy on Monday.”

On September 1, 2008, Herman Cain was laughing at the “imaginary recession.” That is how clueless this man is.  That is also how clueless lots of Republicans are, since they think a guy this hopeless would make a good president during a time of general collapse, a collapse he didn’t even slightly see coming and whose nature escapes him completely.

And when the chips were down, Cain reflexively supported the Establishment by embracing the grotesque and indefensible TARP. He lectured “free-market purists” while doing it. But next time he’ll be a maverick and defy the Establishment, right?

Meanwhile, Ron Paul specifically warned in 2001 that Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, whose NASDAQ bubble had just burst, were in the process of creating a housing bubble.  Here he is saying it: (see video on website).

He made comparably prescient statements over the next several years, while every single other Republican candidate in the running was either mute on the economy or actually thrilled with it.  Thus Joe Scarborough asked him: “How could it be that you knew this on the Banking Committee in 2003, and nobody else did until after the collapse?”

See rest of article on website.