wrong again idiot that was your man Milton Friedman who was an economic adviser to good old Red Ronnie Reagan..
Milton Friedman's $8 trillion error
" . . . the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance ? vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.
This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit ? the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income ? has reached nearly $8 trillion. That?s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.
It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman?s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors."
- David Stockman
Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
By DAVID STOCKMAN
Published: July 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html?_r=0
we don't have free markets nor do we have true capitalism. how can you say that system has failed? I'm more of a Mises, Hayek supporter not so much Milton.