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Originally Posted by kane
I guess I disagree. Not too long ago I read an article by a woman who is an economics professor at Harvard. She was talking about how you can go back to George Washington's presidency and see that he was the first US president to face an economic bust. We had little or no regulation then so banks went out of business, people lost everything and the economy collapsed. Then over time it rebuilt and we would have another boom period followed by another bust period. We played this game over and over again pretty much up until the 1920's when we had one of the largest boom periods ever followed by the largest bust period ever. Now we can debate how FDR's policies effected the length and depth of the depression, but something he did there was a proven winner. He decided that these boom and bust period periods are not good for the country and that some regulation was needed to help curb them. So he created the FDIC which kept people from shitting their pants every time there was a little downturn and draining all their money out of the banks (remember, before this there was no such thing so if you had a bunch of money in a bank and it went out of business, you were screwed). He also helped regulate the markets. Pretty much since then we have had a prolonged period of steady growth. Sure, we have had recession and a couple of them have been bad, but they were nothing like the bust periods of old. Just look at the markets and see how they, and the overall economy have grown since 1940 compared to all the time before that.
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Proven winner Kane? It took nearly 16 years of government intervention to call it a "proven winner". Free Market economies work. Economies with constant government intervention don't. Gold Standard works. In fact, the Gold Standard was in play until 1971, incidentally when our economy began a steady 30+ year decline.
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If you look back pre 1920 we had a pretty small middle class in this country. Part of that was simply because of the boom and bust economy. People would have a job for 4-7 years and do okay, then the bust would come and they would lose that job, lose their bank account, lose their house and have to scrape by for 4-5 years during said bust period. They eventually get a new job, but they spend at least the first few years of having that new job trying to rebuild what they lost during the bust times. They get it rebuilt, only to lose it again during the next bust. It is a vicious cycle. With this regulation we have seen a steady growth in the middle class and stability in the middle class and the economy has flourished. The middle class are the ones that buy most of the stuff. They buy houses and cars and vacations and big screen TVs etc. They do this because they know that things are pretty stable. That their retirement is reasonably safe and that they can put money in a bank savings account and not worry about it disappearing tomorrow. If people knew that they had to save every extra penny they made over the next 5 years so that they could survive the five years following that, they would pass up on many of the things they by now. They would get by, but they wouldn't thrive. If the middle class doesn't thrive, neither does the country.
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Things that fail need to be allowed to fail. You know the concept of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". There's a better chance of economic prosperity when the government doesn't involve itself in economics. All they do is run up the fiscal deficit with no real solutions.
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Just my 2 cents. I'm not saying we have to be draconian, we just need to protect the average person from losing everything they have because a few people got greedy and fucked the markets and economy up.
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Yes, there were a lot of greedy people in the private sector. When they fail, let them fail. But we don't need the government to step in, because I'd rather have a greedy Wall Street banker than a greedy government.