Have We Lost Faith In the Free-Market System of Entrepreneurial Capitalism?

Asks Jeb Bush, at Wall Street Journal, "Capitalism and the Right to Rise" (via Memeorandum).

Americans still favor capitalism, obviously, but the increasing affinity to socialism is startling --- and I'm not just talking about the Occupy asshats. Both Gallup and Pew recently found strong support for socialism, especially among young people.

And the reactions to the Jeb Bush piece are strong among the idiots of the neo-communist blogosphere, for example, here's epic airhead Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog:

Jeb’s got an op ed in today’s Washington Post about how American capitalism is being strangled by taxes and regulations. This is total bullshit, of course, but the wingnuts eat this stuff up. I’m thinking Jeb’s taking steps to shine up his “conservative” credentials and get his name in circulation.

That would be "Wall Street Journal," you stupid piece of scum. And your ignorance is what's "bullshit." Take my state, please. We're drowning in regulations and taxes and people have almost completely lost confidence in government --- and that would be Democrat government, from top to bottom.

But wait! There's more of teh stupid, from Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog:

"The right to rise"? In a sane America, if we wanted to use the phrase "the right to rise" at this moment in history, we'd use it to talk about people who can't rise because they can't sell a house and move to where jobs are because the fat cats won't allow serious levels of mortgage modification to stabilize the housing market; we'd talk about people who can't rise and find work because we refuse to make a serious effort to engage in the sort of Keynesian public-works stimulus that would put money in people's pockets that they would later give to struggling merchants in exchange for food, clothing, and consumer goods; we'd talk about people who can't rise because they've been laid off as teachers or cops as we refuse to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for needed services; we'd talk about students who will struggle to rise for decades because they bear a crushing burden of student loans and no job prospects.

It's all stupid but I've highlighted the most stupid passage of all. We haven't passed a "serious" Keynesian stimulus? Steve, you're on crack, mofo!

The 2009 stimulus authorized $787 billion in government spending, i.e., over 3/4 of a $1 trillion --- and according the president's own White House Council of Economic Advisers, the failed stimulus programs has cost taxpayers a whopping $278,000 per job! Shoot, might as well have turned the stimulus into a big fat freakin' welfare program!

Moreover, being a classically gargantuan bureaucratic program, the money was wasted on pork barrel and already-existing government contracts --- not the new projects the stimulus was ostensibly designed to promote. And not only that: Frankly, whatever jobs have been created would have likely come about without the stimulus and the resultant residual net drag to growth through the additional debt burden placed on the economy. Way to go Steve M.!

 And more! The deeper problem is that Keynesianism's simply discredited, and has long been so. See Allen Metlzer, "Four Reasons Keynesians Keep Getting It Wrong":

Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to bring an economic recovery. Except for a few diehards who want still more government spending, and those who make the unverifiable claim that the economy would have collapsed without it, most now recognize that more than a trillion dollars of spending by the Bush and Obama administrations has left the economy in a slump and unemployment hovering above 9%.

Read it  all --- and weep, you ASFL progressive d-bags!