Matthew Yglesias has an interesting piece that ought to drive the Sarah Palin people, the seeming future of the national GOP, more insane than they may already be.
Writes Yglesias in
Time for a Global Stimulus:
The world needs a coordinated response to the current economic crisis, in which each country commits to undertake stimulus that's appropriate to the size of its economy and to its position in the global balance of trade. ... Global coordination of this sort would be difficult to undertake. Indeed, it would largely be unprecedented. But the economic crisis is also without precedent. Or, rather, it carries with it the scary precedent of the Great Depression. In the 1930s and 1940s, the international dimension of the situation eventually did come to the rescue of the global economy. But it came in the form of a horrifically violent war, which first served as a jobs program for the belligerent countries and then managed to destroy so much of Europe and Asia that the world was left with ample 'shovel ready' projects simply rebuilding. That, however, is not a model we want to emulate. The only alternative is a serious effort at a global coordination of recovery programs.
This is just the sort of coordinated and cooperative action that will drive the rightwingers nuts, in point of fact. But the economic end days appear to be approaching and the free market's invisible hand has now gone the way of all things saved during the rapture: Away to a better place.
The economic artifacts left behind are a hollowed-out American manufacturing base and some awfully scary mass psychology in the western world and Asia that has veered into a disassociative deflationary zone unreachable by traditional monetary policy.
Update: See Andrew Leonard's The Prophets of Doom - "Meet the Cassandras, 14 economists, bloggers, politicians and businesspeople of all political stripes who have become the most strident critics of President Obama's stewardship of the economy" in Salon.