He denies that the great recession of 2008 was caused by deregulation. Instead, he blames it on China (for devaluing its concurrency and causing a trade imbalance and housing bubble built on money from China), on the U.S. Federal Reserve (for its low-interest policies that inflated Wall Street prices), and on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (whose government-backed borrowing inflated housing prices and enriched private corporations). Lenders, brokers, and builders lobbied Congress, as did minority-rights organizations such as ACORN. "In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top-down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by law, encouraged by the president and monitored by pressure groups." "It is simply a myth that the problem came from deregulation." "Fannie and Freddie were holding more than two-thirds of all sub-prime loans, or $2 trillion worht. Nearly three-quarters of new home loans passed through their hands that year." Ridley quotes David Stockman, "The Fannie Mae saga demonstrates that once crony capitalism captures the arms of the state, its potential for cancerous group is truly perilous."
Ridely barely mentions the fraud of Wall Street in selling, underwriting, and mislabeling toxic mortgage-backed securities as safe investments.
And he doesn't mention the need for government to bail out banks for trillions of dollars (including Ridley's own bank!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_policies_and_the_subprime_mortgage_crisis and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#Causes discuss the various causes for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. It's fair to say that both deregulation of the securities industry and government encouragement of lending through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contributed to the problem. Ridley paints a one-sided picture.
He relates population control and family planning to eugenics and murder: sterilization, one-child policies, and forced abortions. He says the key to decreasing population is economic growth: richer people have fewer kids.
He compares governments to crime gangs and environmentalism to a religion: "Nor is skyhook thinking confined to 'god' religions. It animates all sorts of movements that faith at their heart, from Marxism to spiritualism, from astrology to environmentalism."
He quotes French philosopher Paul Buckner: "The environment is the new seclar religion that is rising, in Europe especially, from the ruins of a disbelieving world." People used to blame weather on the gods. Ridley says "The huge appeal of the 'extreme weather' meme of recent years comes from the fact that it plays into this divine-retribution mentality."
He also compares climate change and Marxism to religions. Similarly with organic farming (which had spiritualist origins), as well as opposition to GMO grains.
But environmentalism and the theory of climate change evolved bottom-up, from the findings and concerns of numerous scientists and activists. Skepticism of climate change is top-down, imposed by ideologues and industrialists with an axe to grind.
Ridley admits that there is some alarming scientific evidence for climate change, but he thinks that proponents have overstated the evidence. Actually, the evidence has gotten stronger in the past few years.
He quotes from Liberal Fascists. He says both Communism and Fascism are similar manifestations of top-down love of government. According to Ridley, the market, not government, has historically led to most increases in living standards.
Most technology emerges bottom-up, he claims. He quotes some OECD research that suggests that publicly funded research has almost no positive effect on economic growth, while private funding does.
But most corporations are run in highly top-down manners and depend on government for many services and research.
None other than Bill Gates, Jr. thinks government is more efficient than private industry in research: In Bill Gates: The private sector is completely inept, Gates writes:
"Since World War II, U.S.-government R&D has defined the state of the art in almost every area" When I first got into this I thought, 'How well does the Department of Energy spend its R&D budget?' And I was worried: 'Gosh, if I'm going to be saying it should double its budget, if it turns out it's not very well spent, how am I going to feel about that? But as I've really dug into it, the DARPA money is very well spent, and the basic-science money is very well spent. The government has these 'Centers of Excellence.' They should have twice as many of those things, and those things should get about four times as much money as they do."
Gates also says the private sector is incapable of addressing climate change.
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