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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

> A huge reason I've lost my faith in libertarian politics is that the 2008 bailouts convinced me it's a scam.

This is rediculous. Libertarians were leading the charge against the 2008 bailouts before they even happened, and it was liberals, (e.g. barney frank, paul krugman) who were among the chief architects of the bailouts.

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> This is rediculous. Libertarians were leading the charge against the 2008 bailouts before they even happened, and it was liberals, (e.g. barney frank, paul krugman) who were among the chief architects of the bailouts.

I forgot about that time that Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke were actually Barney Frank and Paul Krugman's secret identities.

Of course, Paulson and Bernanke are nominally "not liberals" because they were appointed by a "not liberal" executive, but orchestrating a bailout like this requires support in the legislature and support in the court of public opinion. Frank and Krugman were important figures in those spheres.

Why are you not using the word conservative?

because OP refers to libertarians who are not necessarily conservative.

I should have been more precise: right-libertarian and Reagan-style economic libertarian politics. I would still say though that libertarians of the more independent type have been played as political tools to push for one-sided policies that deregulate in ways that only benefit certain select groups of people.

I would also dispute that liberals (or at least only liberals) were architects of the bailouts, which mostly happened under the Bush administration.

I mean I don't know how much more right-libertarian you can get than, say Ron Paul, who basically ran on the platform of no bailouts, having predicted the crash of 2008 (he's a perma-bear so that could be a bit of broken clock being right twice a day, nontheless sticking to his guns on the policy). Keeping history in mind: Ron Paul, who supported Reagan in the beginning publically broke with the Reagan administration because of Reagan's non-libertarian economic policy and ran against bush in 1988.

> I would also dispute that liberals (or at least only liberals) were architects of the bailouts, which mostly happened under the Bush administration.

Bush himself called the process of the bailout "breaking capitalism to save capitalism". This is a philosophy that aligns strongly with liberalism - that the government must intervene when the market fails. Should it be surprising that liberals helped architect the bailout?

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