Article: Free-market thinkers: with bailouts and other unabashed socialist projects being embraced by both political parties to "save our economy," has free-market economics been proved faulty?(HISTORY--PAST AND PERSPECTIVE)

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In the bailout-a-week political climate, it is all too easy to believe that free-market economics are as passe as powdered wigs. Everyone, it seems, is a socialist now, and the old gospel of laissez-faire and free enterprise has been discredited by a cascade of free-market failures that threaten to bring down the economy of the entire developed world.

"For too long, the prevailing attitude in Washington has been that the market always knows best," Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said recently. Economist and newly minted Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has counseled the new Obama administration to "figure out how much help they ...

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