Apparently Talk is Cheap

Lawrence Summers, the economic guy in charge of the current spend-a-thon, didn't always believe in central control and Keynesian economics.

As this PBS interview here shows (scroll down).

A few choice bits, emphasis mine...

LAWRENCE SUMMERS: ... The political debates take place within a universe that is shaped by the development of new ideas. Of those new ideas, none is more important than the rediscovery of Adam Smith and the idea that a decentralized system relying on price signals collects information and provides much more insurance than any kind of centrally planned or directed type of system.

INTERVIEWER: Talk about your own intellectual involvement as a young graduate student. What did you think of [Hayek] and Friedman?

LAWRENCE SUMMERS: ... That's a respect that is born of the power of his arguments as one considers them more and more deeply. But it's a respect that's also born of the lessons of the experience of the success of decentralization in a place like Silicon Valley and of the failures of centralization in places like Central Europe and Russia. ... If you think about it, it cannot be an accident that it is the same 15-year period when communism fell, when command-and-control corporations like General Motors and IBM had to be drastically restructured, when planning ministries throughout the developing world were closed down, and when the Japanese model of industrial policy proved to be a complete failure. There is something about this epoch in history that really puts a premium on incentives, on decentralization, on allowing small economic energy to bubble up rather than a more top-down, more directed approach, that may have been a more fruitful approach in earlier years.
BIG SNIP
INTERVIEWER: Let me just back up on Friedman before we carry on with that. Why was he such a devil figure in your youth?

LAWRENCE SUMMERS: Because he seemed, with his emphasis on individualism, freedom, and markets, to be so unconcerned with fairness and with the needs of the collective. I think what people came to appreciate is that there is a kind of ethic of "finders keepers" which says the people are entitled to what they produce, which also enters into concepts of fairness. Many of the ideas that were put forward in the name of redistribution and fairness seemed to do far more to hurt those who were well-off than to help those who were poorly off. And it was those losses, those attempts to be fair and redistribute, that led to some greater skepticism about the scope for government to direct and plan economic activity.

INTERVIEWER: So have those concerns gone away? And if you admire some of what Friedman's done, what's happened to those concerns? How do you reconcile those concerns about Friedman's lack of concern?

LAWRENCE SUMMERS: I think we've come to find that market-oriented mechanisms can do things to increase equity. The availability of private insurance provides tremendous insulation for millions of individuals. But I think we've also come to see that an excessive emphasis on equity can result in a leveling down rather than a leveling up, and what's important is to find ways of leveling up our income distribution. That's probably led to much more emphasis on the importance of education relative to the importance of income transfers than would have been the case a decade ago, and I think that's welcome.
BIG SNIP
At the same time we came to an increasing awareness of the dangers of stifling private initiative, because you can't know what form it will take and therefore if you stifle it there's the risk that you're going to have very large losses from stifling something very promising.