It seems the financial crises has struck a chord with economists both near and far. The following was one of my comments from The Austrian Economists:

I like to begin a lot my classes by explaining that economics is not all about boring GDP, interest rates and financial markets its about a much richer and deeper set of topics pertaining to all of human behavior.
Perhaps I’ve taken that too far because admittedly I know very little about the contemporary political history surrounding the American financial crises. It seems true regardless of the causes that we must in fact understand the causes before any proposed cure can hope to be effective. As for the cause there are two mainstream perspectives: (1) the republicans did it by de-regulating the financial markets, (2) the democrats did it by sub optimally regulating the financial markets. And both of these lead to some sort of bail out with tweaking today.
I think these obviously seem shortsighted, and I am puzzled at the state of economic understanding in much the same way as Boettke. If 500 planes fell out of the sky we wouldn’t blame gravity we would blame some form of policy or plan, and rightly so. To blame markets in this case seems odd.
But what are these specific “de-regulations” that people are accusing the republicans of?
There’s a host of literature that admits to temporary downturns after de-regulations, if the Republicans truly understood the process of deregulation and had some sort of ideological end in mind, then they would have owned up to the potential of downturns and been prepared for such social expansions (because it would threaten their end). I think this greatly weakens the claim that there is some sort of laissez faire conspiracy behind Washington republicans.