Un-Change

President-elect Obama now promises the same kind of 'change' that Bush delivered after Clinton.

He promises to get rid of all that harmful 'Bush-era deregulation' that caused the crisis. The only problem with that idea is that Clinton actually delivered more deregulation in the 1990's, whilst Bush added strict accounting regulations for Wall St after the collapse of Enron.

For those clueless pundits (most of them working for the ABC and Fairfax) who still think Bush and Republicans somehow represent 'extreme market based capitalism', maybe they should google "Sarbanes Oxley" and see how the heck more regulation = deregulation.

These same clueless pundits mistakenly assume that the US somehow represents a free market and capitalism in all industries, like health, education, welfare and foreign policy. It would be equally wrong to assume China still represents pure communism.

Reason Magazine has a great piece titled "Obama's Clinton Problem"

When it comes to overall regulation, as my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Wayne Crews notes in his study "10,000 Commandments," the Bush administration has set records with the tens of thousands of pages it put in the Federal Register. So to the extent that Obama has said he would reverse financial deregulation, what he would largely be overturning are the financial modernizations Bill Clinton signed into law and that Clinton administration officials agree led to the ‘90s prosperity.

....

To the extent that Obama's campaign attacked the specific deregulation policies that McCain backed, Obama ended up doing more than just running against McCain and his advisers, such as the much-vilified former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm. Obama was also campaigning against Bill Clinton, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and virtually all of the Clinton administration's economic officials. The same folks, it's worth nothing, that now often surround Barack Obama.