Bernanke wants to centrally plan our economy

My goodness this is scary. Fed Chairman Bernanke proposes to give federal regulators sweeping new power to not only regulate individual institutions for financial soundness, but to regulate the entire industry. What he's really suggesting here is that federal regulators centrally plan our financial industry. This is another case where a problem caused by government, the recent credit crisis, results in bigger, more oppressive, and more dangerous government. Central planning never works. We need to extract the Fed and the government from our financial industry to make it more stable and responsible to customers and shareholders, not faceless, bureaucratic central planners.

The idea that some isolated bureaucrats in Washington could possibly do a better job regulating an entire industry than the 10s of millions of people who are involved in the industry as employees, stockholders, customers or otherwise is lunacy. That lunacy caused the Great Depression. It caused the economic problems of the '70s. It caused the current credit crisis. Now Bernanke wants to expand that lunacy tremendously.

And you can bet most Democrats and most Republicans will jump on board at the opportunity to expand their power at our expense, all the while telling us how much they support free markets. Think of the opportunities for vote-buying, nepotism and corruption. How could our aristocrats resist?

This is a pattern for Bernanke. He doesn't think the Fed should be limited to fighting inflation. He has used his power to attempt to manage our economic growth. He consistently goes beyond his mandate to control inflation and tried to grab new powers for the Fed. He thinks the Fed should centrally plan our entire economy. If I was a conspiracy theorist, I would wonder if this credit crisis wasn't planned in advance just so the Fed could make such a huge power grab.