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“As bank shares plunge to new lows around the world,” said David Roche in _The Wall Street Journal_, we seem to be entering the next—hopefully, the last—chapter of the financial crisis. “The
final word will probably be nationalization of the major financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom.” The piecemeal steps we’ve taken so far—propping up banks to
prop up inflated assets—have only made the crisis last longer. This “‘nationalize now’ meme” is being bandied about a little too casually, said James Surowiecki in _The New Yorker_. The
financial crisis is bad, but it doesn’t “invalidate the general principle that private enterprise is typically better at efficiently allocating resources than government.” Also, it’s
troubling, “even to a non-libertarian,” that the government could be in charge of determining who gets credit. That’s why we should nationalize banks reluctantly, and “like real
capitalists,” said Steve Waldman in _Interfluidity_ (via _RealClearPolitics_). That means taking over failed, “systemically important” banks and running them like commercial lenders until we
sell them off, not making them “tools of the state” to increase credit flows. If the government is “dumb enough to force-feed credit into the economy,” it can do so with “its own damned
money.” SUBSCRIBE TO THE WEEK Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. SUBSCRIBE & SAVE SIGN UP FOR THE WEEK'S FREE
NEWSLETTERS From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News
Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. Not to put too fine a point on it, but “we’ve already done a whole lot of nationalizing,” said Kevin Drum in _Mother
Jones_ online. Not including the forced take-overs or sell-offs of Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia, “we’ve already nationalized three enormous financial institutions: Fannie
Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG." It seems we’re “more allergic to the word ‘nationalization’ than to the actual fact itself.” A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day –
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