Amid the shake-ups on Wall Street, the major news media outlets have reported with enlightening and unnerving detail the decline and fall of some of America’s largest financial institutions. For some of these market behemoths, death seems to have come with an executioner’s swiftness. Surely, some transformation is at hand.

And so, this provides an opportunity. As the dust clears, conservatives of every stripe have a chance to speak to a live need in the marketplace—the need for a new direction. Who will answer the question, “What went wrong?” Who will offer the best solution to, “What do we do from here?”

This is a fascinating time for those of us that came of age in the post-Cold War era, when free markets seemed to have won the day across the globe. In the last week, very few have come to the defense of the financial industry as the benign creations of the invisible hand. What now shall we call free market capitalism?

While Republicans, and Democrats, continue to apologize and subsidize, and the last laissez-faire defenders are shaking their heads, the traditionalists are receiving perhaps the best news they've heard in decades. With Wall Street in disarray, maybe everyone will move home, scrap their cars, and get back to tending their zucchini.

It should go without mentioning that the recent market turbulence has American socialists licking their lips in anticipation of increased restrictions in the marketplace. Among my peers I have heard nothing but condemnations of market capitalism and encouraged by some of our professors, they have come to the conclusion that capitalism has breathed its last gasp. I have taken the socially irresponsible step to point out that what is needed in our markets and in our society is one thing further regulations and restrictions in the marketplace cannot provide--accountability. From the bottom to the top a sense of personal accountability is evaporating from American society. Americans appear all too willing to accept federal subsidation of their incomes, housing, educations, healthcare, and retirements. If a people are willing to abdicate those responsibilities--once the exclusive province of the individual--to a federal authority, they are no longer free men. Men who have willingly surrendered their freedom have no need for, or sense of, personal accountability. Just a thought.

A fascinating bit of reporting this week from the NYTimes: Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way.

A sense of relief comes from reading this story about the parallels in the Swedish economy in the early 1990s to the events on Wall Street in the past weeks. The gist of the reporting is that this kind of crisis has happened before, drastic measures were taken, but it did not spell the doom of a market-based economy. Although, it must be conceded that in a discussion of Sweden, that term should be used loosely.

Chris, your argument highlights the importance of what Patrick Deneen argued on his blog: the lesson of this crisis will not be fully learned until people reflect seriously on the shortcomings of the common leveraged, suburban, endlessly-consuming way of life. From Deneen's perspective, abstractions dominate our choices, at work and at home, rather than a felt sense of production attached to place. As an editor of a web journal, I wonder if some portion of the weight of that accusation falls on my shoulders. But it is surely a point to dwell upon.

The speaker made an excellent point about the nature of grace. While Grace is a free gift, it is most certainly not cheap or without value.
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seandalton
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It seems to me that the current crisis we are enveloped in is one that has exposed the limits of what most conservatives, and practically all Republicans, view as "free markets". In one sense of course, this debacle was obviously not a free market meltdown, in that the government had its large thumb in this financial pie via the quasi-government entities of Fannie and Freddie. But beyond that, and the obviously inane lending pracitices such as "liar loans" pushed by the liberals, there are larger issues to be thought out. Firstly, it seems to me that many conservatives need to embrace the facts concerning "free markets" when they fail on this level. Failures that the marketplace takes in stride when numerous companies compete, can become ruinous on a large scale when a few large players fail among a small basket of competitors. Secondly. there needs to be a discussion concerning the wisdom of allowing derivatives for a market such as mortgages. These derivatives seem to me to be troublesome for the simple reason that the underlying security--home mortgages, are simply not reliable as they are with other derivative based securities-e.g. oil, copper, wheat. When one buys a derivative (option or futures) contract for copper or gold one is never left to wonder if the underlying asset is pure or if it will soon be discovered to be debased. This is crucial when you are talking about leveraged money. Sadly, the Republican party simply refused to address these matters, and in fact contributed to the problem by deregulating the mortgage industry and allowing such products to proliferate. Adam Smith was in general opposed to enterprises which existed for the sole reason of profiting off of the movement of money alone with no underlying economic rationale. These money movements took away a large degree of the responsibility that might otherwise have caused prudence to reign. When your are making millions of dollars by selling financial instruments with little regard for the underlying product you are producing then you have a recipe for disaster.
Any criticisms or thoughts are welcomed.
Carl Sanders