In February, James Sharpe wrote a defense of doing nothing about the financial crisis.

In March, I wrote about a lecture by Kevin Dowd on how using existing bankruptcy law would have been much better than bailing out the banks.

Now, here is an article by Professor Jeffrey A. Miron of Harvard. The professor is on sparkling form:

The first thing to note about the financial crisis is that the federal government never had any business intervening in the personal decision of whether you want to own a home. There is no rational economic argument, or any argument I know of, that says the market of buying and selling homes is imperfect in some way, requiring government action.

Miron then demolishes the arguments for bank bailouts, using sound economic principles.

The government didn’t need to get involved, either in the first place or to fix the problems it created. Existing law would have sorted it out.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/134483.html
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/10/the_case_for_doing_nothing_97382.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10342