October 27, 2008 (LPAC)--Arrogance and insanity often run together, and this week they make a joint appearance in Forbes, which has put its chairman, Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes, on its cover. A rabid proponent of British-style "free market" economics, Forbes has touted itself as "The Capitalist Tool," although many consider the "t" in Tool to be a typo. Steve Forbes himself, a silver-spoon type whose family traces its lineage and fortune back to their participation in the British East India's opium trafficking in the 1800s, is a right-wing nut who ran for President in 1996 and 2000, on a platform of privatizing Social Security, a flat tax and deregulation, and was one of the signers of the infamous Project for the New American Century document in 1997, the founding document of the neo-cons' American Empire wet dream.

Today's New York Times reports that the Forbes staff held an "emergency meeting" on Oct. 10, as the Dow plunged, and "decided to rip up their next issue... Instead of their planned cover, they wanted something that would address the upheaval. Their solution? Their own boss, Steve Forbes, the company's chairman and an economic adviser to John McCain."

Thus was born the Nov. 10 issue of Forbes, with Steve Forbes on the cover, and Steve Forbes on the inside, telling us "How Capitalism Will Save Us." In his article, Mr. Forbes assures us that, "If sensible rescue efforts continue--and they will--the immediate crisis will quickly pass."

We are impressed at Mr. Forbes's ability to describe the largest government intervention in history as "capitalism saving us," a dichotomy which in a lesser person might be considered schizophrenic, or at least shamelessly duplicitous, but Mr. Forbes explains the contradiction away by asserting that "What started in August 2007 was not the failure of free markets but the outcome of bad government actions." That way, since the government caused it, it is only fair that the government solve it. Forbes even goes so far as to complain about the media blaming the crisis on "excessive deregulation" and calling it "a free-market failure." Imagine that.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, and Steve Forbes has clearly gone off the deep end, unable to deal with the failure of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system and his beloved British Empire. So what he would have previously denounced as "tax-and-spend liberal socialism" instead becomes a "sensible rescue effort," as he warps reality to fit his own axiomatic fallacies. Mr. Forbes, you are the idiot of the day.