Daniel Hannan points out the obvious:
We tried to warn you. We said that the bail-out would fail. We pointed out that nationalisation never worked. We predicted that the seizure of the banks would be accompanied by heavy-handed state intervention in their procedures.
Sure enough, stock exchanges have continued to plummet, several banks (notably, as Ambrose reports, in Ireland) are looking for additional bail-outs, and the banks that have already been expropriated are being told by ministers how much to lend and to whom – which is, of course, precisely what caused the crisis in the first place. The next thing, no doubt, is that they will be told to meet the government’s ethnic quotas, to redistribute a proportion of accounts of more than £50,000 to customers with credit problems, and create a number of sinecures for prominent Labour supporters. That’s what happens in socialist economies.
No idea is so bad and fails so completely that you can’t find academics and politicians attempting to repeat it on the grounds of it having been insufficiently implemented.