Alan Greenspan and the cowardice of the current political moment

I think I just lost a little respect for Alan Greenspan. Where is Milton Friedman when we need him?

Greenspan: 'Crisis Broader Than Anything I Could Have Imagined'

Here is where the downfall occurs for this prevailing and wrongheaded logic going around these days that regulation will prevent future financial meltdowns like the current situation:

It won't.

Do you really think that there will be no more financial meltdowns after this one? Really? And when it occurs, are we really going to have another lame Democratic verdict that it was the free market and not people making bad choices responsible for it?

When a downturn happens again - which it will because freedom and a free market does not guarantee that we will always make good or even better choices, necessarily, absent understanding of our mistakes - will we get honest, at that point, that regulation cannot stop us from screwing up? You really think regulation will prevent all future problems like this one? Really?

I'm sure I'll have to listen to a lot of lame "It if wouldn't have been for our efforts, things would have been really bad," rationalizations of the failures of regulation and regulators. It's my favorite excuse for why bad ideas don't deliver.

Good people screwing up. It happens in governments. Happens in the market. And no hubris about finding just the right laws or rules or regulation or force to prevent that fact of life will ever make it go away.

We do seem to be enamoured with regulation, in the political moment, to resolve some of these fundamental questions, once and for all. But it won't. And the proof will be in the pudding when it doesn't. And , like all things, this political moment too shall pass.