Terrible Credit Crunch of 2008—The Greatest Hoax of All Time?

The beauty of the Great Hoax of 2008, from the perspective of the ruling class, is that it was also a Great Scare, and such scares serve as the pretexts for the rulers’ most audacious assaults on the peasants’ lives, liberties, and purses. You’d almost have to admire the elite’s ability to spook the rest of us into blind, unreasoning panic on such a flimsy basis, if it weren’t for the fact that after the episode has passed, we find ourselves enormously worse off, our economic prospects diminished greatly and our liberties throttled even more by an even bigger Leviathan, with nothing to show for it on the upside but the further enrichment of a handful of big bankers and other malefactors of great wealth.

Robert Higgs explores the bailout deception.