White people...

[Raev]

Originally Posted by Lune [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Consider presidencies of George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.

Of course conservatives have to account for the past failures of the applications of conservatism. You guys wiggle all you want but regardless of how moderate those presidents were their economic theory was fiscal conservatism. They both did nothing but fuck up the country except where they integrated liberalism heavily like in the establishment of the EPA

I am not a fan of either Bush or Nixon. But let's not forget that both of them inherited a gigantic pile of steaming shit from their Democratic predecessors. Nixon came in after Johnson had started a massive war in Vietnam and had pressured the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. As Austrian theory would predict, this boom lead to the bust in the 70s and stagflation etc. Bush came in after Clinton had freshly repealed Glass-Steagall and the banks were already busy building a time bomb of mortgage backed securities.

Now you can argue both of them made things worse. Nixon took us off the gold standard, and keeping the US dollar relevant meant sucking up to Saudi Arabia. Bush pushed for more home ownership, appointed Greenspan who cut rates after the 2001 dotcom crash, and took us into Iraq. Neither of them were particularly competent.

The point is it's much more reasonable to say that the failure of the Soviet Union with socialism reflects poorly than the failure of two random presidents (who aren't even in full control of the government) does on capitalism.