Temporary nationalization is a non-starter ...
Maybe the difference is in the spelling, but temporary nationalisation is exactly what Her Majesty's Treasury appears intent on doing this week with Bradford & Bingley.... "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Add to that the fact that the corporate wing gets legislation and the veneer of expertise handed to them by their corporate backers, and House progressives are mostly forced to come up with things on their own, and the outside advice they do get includes things as politically dead on arrival as temporary nationalization of banks, and its not wonder that the progressive wing of the House Democrats do not have a horse in the race. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
... but by all appearances the Bush administration was perfectly happy with nationalizing businesses to bail them out ... the opposition would be in the Senate, and somehow I do not imagine the House of Lords presenting such a hurdle for a UK government to get over.
The problem is certainly not that the policy is guaranteed to fail if enacted ... while the devil is in the details, its one of the main lines of approach for a government addressing a solvency crisis.
If an academic wants to make the point, "this is a solution that can work, and look how its being ignored", that's a fine lesson on the limits of the political discourse in American today ... but that's different from making a policy proposal that you hope to see adopted. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
