In a Boston Globe op-ed, “Obama should give Warren a recess appointment,” HLS Professor Charles Fried supports an interim appointment for Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Fried served as solicitor general in the second Reagan administration and as a justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. His op-ed appeared in the July 29, 2010, edition of the Boston Globe.
Capitalism and markets depend on the morality, honesty, and good faith of those who participate in them. Markets function best and deliver prosperity when they are honest and the law enforces that honesty; dishonesty, fraud, and official corruption are the poisons that keep markets in many parts of the world from delivering the goods.
That’s where Elizabeth Warren comes in. Those who are lobbying hard against her nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Agency are the same people who lobbied against financial reform legislation and lost. They paint her as the enemy of capitalism and free markets. Nothing could be further from the truth: She is the enemy of dishonesty, abuse, and just plain theft.