Paul Krugman makes a point today in his column that I, and others, have made before:

Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.

   Precisely. A couple of months ago, I wrote that we should simply fire the free-marketeers who had cratered the economy–the whole lot of them. Just on the merits, they completely screwed the pooch. I’m not even talking socialism here. The whole coterie of Robert Rubin acolytes and their "relatives" simply mismanaged the economy.

   For the better part of three decades, we’ve heard–and now they are trying to continue this rap–that government can’t manage the economy. Well, why the hell not? If you base it on the facts, not ideology, I’d say–the morons who managed to obliterate trillions of dollars in wealth in about a year have shown us how incompetent they are. Let’s give the government a chance. It can’t do worse–and will likely do better.