Let me take another bite...

...at this apple, as they say in Washington these days. We all know that the pendulum swings in public sentiment from right to left and back again. But I wonder if part of the reason it swings is that reality demands it. In other words, by the late 1970s, the era that began with FDR's New Deal was getting a little long in the tooth. The government had gotten too big, the bureaucracy too vast, and taxes too onerous. The stage was set for a Ronald Reagan to come in and unleash the private sector and curb the excesses of Big Government. I even cast my first vote for the Gipper in the Minnesota Republican caucus of 1976.

After I made my way to Chicago and the Mercantile Exchange in 1981, I began to learn about the economy and the financial markets. One lesson I quickly picked up on was that the market, like a thermometer, is never wrong. While humans--traders, economists, government policy-makers--are fallible, the markets never are. They can't be. It was also at this time that I was introduced to the Austrian economists and the novels of Ayn Rand (and her non-fiction as well). I learned that the markets were the most efficient allocator of goods and services. It was practically axiomatic. I had subscriptions to Reason and Liberty magazines and eventually joined the Libertarian Party. Everything made sense and fit together perfectly.

Fast forward to the Bush years. In an effort to emulate St. Ronald and stimulate the economy, the president cut taxes on the rich. This time, however, it didn't have the same effect. Jobs and incomes remained stubbornly flat. The economy grew, albeit at a slow rate, while the stock and housing markets inflated in almost historic bubbles. By 2007, it had become apparent to me that the pendulum had swung too far to the right. Now it was the private sector that was squeezing the public. One of the most notable examples was the private health insurance industry. While profits soared, fewer and fewer Americans could get coverage and the ones who did paid more and more for it. The market was clearly not serving the consumer in the most efficient way. The religion of privatization had also run its course. Even the Iraq War had been subcontracted to Blackwater and other private militias, many of whom were barely accountable to the American people. And then the stock and housing market bubbles burst, and rather than become a modern-day Herbert Hoover, President Bush wisely decided to chuck his free-market principles out the window and listen to his Fed Chairman and Treasury Secretary and bail out the financial system. The pendulum had finally swung--with a vengeance.

It was around then that I finally completed my own pendulum swing and concluded that while Reagan may have been right for his era, maybe it was time to give Obama and the Democrats a turn. Maybe Ayn Rand didn't have all the answers. Something about 47 million Americans without health insurance just didn't sound right to me anymore. Even though many of my contemporaries (are you out there, Joe Kernan?) have been unable to reconsider the lessons they learned in the '80s, I'm willing to consider that the world has changed and that maybe it's time to let the government curb some of the market's excesses.