People indulge in every sort of political fantasy about redistributionism during good times, but these fantasies evaporate once it becomes clear to us that wealth can vanish far more quickly than it came.
This is a tendency of everyone who lives in a booming economy: we tend to think of the wealth that surrounds us as a fixed part of nature, something that is not going away and can therefore be toyed with and manipulated by state actors.
But in a recessionary environment, people’s lives are disrupted, and economics suddenly takes on a new importance.
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It seems abundantly clear that regulation is a paternalistic concept, at least. Who yields that ‘fatherly’ authority to the empirical economists and the politicians? Who has that right?
When everyone ( or enough of us) realizes that there is absolutely no moral authority for economic intervention then the ego-driven interventionists will be seen as oppressors with regulations designed to oppress.
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