Charles Dumas
Telegraph
September 14, 2008
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The US low-tax zealot, Grover Norquist, is famous for wanting to “shrink government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”. Still alive, he is not turning in his grave, but his idea has been well and truly buried – and not by the Democrats he hates; they have been tongue-tied on the credit crisis.
It is Wall Street, the paradigm of “red in tooth and claw” capitalism, that has turned to government subsidy on an unprecedented scale.
Low, ideally non-existent, taxes may be very desirable, but when free-market principles came into conflict with the survival of business as we know it, priorities were clear. The US Federal government’s full faith and credit – in other words, the resources of American taxpayers – should be urgently deployed to preserve as much as possible of the financial industry.
Luckily for Wall Street, government was still too big to fit in that bathtub – and proved only too willing to take up the challenge.
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