Bush’s ‘rescue’ of free market more a rubout

In many respects, the left and the right are of shared sentiment about the presidency of George W. Bush.

The left regrets Iraq and the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against rogue states that support terrorists. For the right, it’s the policies that continued this week with Friday’s announcement of a $17.4 billion bridge loan to General Motors and Chrysler.

“Under ordinary economic circumstances, I would say this is the price that failed companies must pay,” Bush said. “And I would not favor intervening to prevent the automakers from going out of business.” But, “if we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers. … allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action.”

Those remarks are consistent with his admission to CNN’s Candy Crowley this week that “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”

Iraq and Afghanistan never struck me as the quagmire the left feared —- and incessantly declared, jumping at every opportunity to find cataclysmic failure, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did last year in asserting that “… this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” It wasn’t and, promisingly, Barack Obama’s early signals suggest that candidate Obama and President Obama may have different definitions of withdrawal of all combat troops from Iraq in 16 months.

For a president and his party, it’s far easier to favor policies that invite failure, or to declare that it happened during the other guy’s watch, than to have the world and historians know that President Obama and his party are responsible for it.

President Bush is obviously guided now by the same sense of historical accountability that is likely to temper Obama on Iraq.

On Iraq, there’s never been any doubt that U.S. combat forces would leave. For the Bush Administration, that timetable was based “on success.” For Democrats, it was a fixed date. In either case, while there was no hard-and-fast exit timetable, there was general agreement that the U.S. should have an exit strategy.

With President Bush’s abandonment of free-market principles “to save the free market system,” conservatives find ourselves in the mode that liberals were and are on Iraq. Having intervened “to save the free- market system,” how do we get back out? What’s the exit strategy?

On Iraq, Democrats would have forced an exit sooner or later had Republicans not. There’s an entrenched anti-war bloc that has existed in this country since Vietnam.

But once business and government merge, as they are now doing, there is no constituency beyond gray-beard fuddy-duddies, Libertarians and a small band of fiscal conservative purists who will demand an exit strategy. Truly, there is no going back.

A clean loan to the automobile companies, or better yet as Ronald D. Utt of the Heritage Foundation has suggested, an advance seven-year purchase of vehicles that would provide them about $10 billion, is far preferable to loans that come with car czars and federal rules on executive pay and perks.

I’m offended by sports and entertainment salaries and by outrageous Wall Street bonuses that suck up America’s creativity and employ it to find new ways to make money on debt. Meanwhile, some poor production worker who’s actually building a product suffers job loss because politicians and debt-mongers in the private sector thought it useful to put people in houses they couldn’t afford —- and then to mix bad debt and good and sell it off.

But while offended by some marketplace practices, I don’t want politicians who are equally responsible for the economic downturn, determining what athletes, entertainers or business executives should be paid. I don’t want them making executive decisions for car companies. I don’t want them making investments in private-sector companies and then writing regulations or passing trade laws to protect that investment.

The president was right to intervene to contain the financial panic that had gripped Wall Street and the world. That panic would have decimated retirement savings for millions of working Americans.

But every step taken that abandoned free- market principles should have been one that limited future entanglement between business and government. Instead, we’re going the other way. We’re inviting politicians to find some scapegoats and then to manage businesses and industries, politicians who are incapable of designing government programs that work or of holding them accountable.

Bush has abandoned free-market principles, no question. Has he saved the free-market system? I fear just the contrary.

> Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Friday.

jwooten@ajc.com