The Eternal Recurrence of Alan Reynolds

As Matt Welch notes below, Cato's Alan Reynolds has a pretty darn smart piece in The Wall Street Journal today.

The very same Alan Reynolds had a really smart piece in reason almost exactly 20 years ago, too:

A year has passed since the steepest stock market drop in almost 60 years, with the Dow-Jones average falling by over a third from October 5 to October 19, 1987. Yet nothing much has come of it. Those who were expecting a deep recession at the end of 1987 instead began worrying, only a few months later, about a supposedly "overheated boom." The stock market quickly recovered about half of its loss, with stocks of smaller companies doing even better in the rebound of early 1988. The enduring legacy of the Crash of '87 is that it provided a convenient excuse for a variety of possible increases in government authority, which may yet cause serious economic trouble. The crash has been used to denigrate a prolonged economic expansion during the Reagan years, to support calls for new taxes, and to argue for increased regulation of financial markets.

Something to look forward to.