Republican anti-regulatory moves–short memories

    Republicans have long ridden the same pony, i.e., lower taxes, especially for corporations and the wealthy, and anti-regulation by government. As a by product, they have opposed most social welfare operations by government. They believe these tenets with a zeal that borders on religious doctrine. A free market will always make the best decisions. Government regulation of business practices are enemies of free markets and must always be opposed. Faced with the wreckage produced by following those precepts, namely the Great Depression in the thirties and the near collapse of the banking industry in 2008, their voices dim for a while, but then shamelessly they attack the very regulatory measures enacted in response to those crises. The markets, they argue, would have righted itself if left alone by government. The stolidly Republican former CEO of Goldman Sachs and Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury during the 2008 financial crisis, Hank Paulson expressed it as follows: “An open, competitive, and liberalized financial market can effectively allocate scarce resources in...