Can Government Officials Legally Lie?

I am not a fan of former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner. He presided over the politically conceived, patently unconstitutional and anti-free market taxpayer bailouts of banks, automakers and insurance companies in the latter part of the administration of former President George W. Bush, when he was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and during the first term of President Obama, when he was the secretary of the Treasury.

In those years and still today he has argued that aggressive government intervention leads to a stronger financial system because the government will take risks with taxpayer money that the taxpayers themselves will not take with it. He believes in the use of government coercion, rather than the voluntary choices of consumers and investors.

Those of us who embrace the free market do so not only because it has produced more broad-based prosperity than any government has, but also because it offers the only moral system of financial exchanges for goods and services because in a truly free market every exchange is voluntary. Coercing money from taxpayers to pay for the failures of businesses is theft.

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