What planet are you from? Deregulation, meaning less and less government regulation of markets of various sorts, had been a common ideological mantra ritualistically implemented by both Democratic and Republican Party leaders from the Reagan years forward. Were we to continue down this path, the Hobbesian state of nature would sound Edenic by comparison. In any case, your conclusion does not at all follow from your five occasionally incoherent points.

Economic libertarianism (i.e., a dogmatic belief in absolutely unfettered markets, which have never existed in any case) is a bankrupt ideology.

I don’t want either “ordinary Joe or even a Sarah Palin type” person(s) leading us out of this mess, as they’re the ones who voted for the folks who got us into this mess in the first place.

What planet are you from? Deregulation, meaning less and less government regulation of markets of various sorts, had been a common ideological mantra ritualistically implemented by both Democratic and Republican Party leaders from the Reagan years forward. Were we to continue down this path, the Hobbesian state of nature would sound Edenic by comparison. In any case, your conclusion does not at all follow from your five occasionally incoherent points.

Economic libertarianism (i.e., a dogmatic belief in absolutely unfettered markets, which have never existed in any case) is a bankrupt ideology.

I don’t want either “ordinary Joe or even a Sarah Palin type” person(s) leading us out of this mess, as they’re the ones who voted for the folks who got us into this mess in the first place.

1- The central bankers running the Federal Reserve system are no better tham witch-doctors, and worse than weather forecasters. They spout Greenspanesque incomprehensible jargon suggesting they know what they are doing, but in fact, “the entire intellectual edifice. . .of mainstream economic theory” is more bankrupt than the banking institutions the Federal Reserve system was monitoring. We must understand that the great intellects at the government’s control board don’t know which lever does what, so they can steer, but not well.

2- The legislators in the House of Representatives, especially the House Banking Committee, cannot be counted on to solve anything–they are the ones that urged their government agencies to guarantee and buy up overvalued mortgage paper from non-credit-worthy borrowers. This combined idiocy with cronyism to create a flood of bad mortgages and a peaking of real estate prices– a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

3- The Senate, with its Sarbanes-Oxley reform, demonstrates the poverty of common sense in that legislative body. By requiring banks to “mark to market,” and equating a thin or zero market to zero value, these pin-heads forced institutions to write down assets even more than they had probably declined in value. Common sense judgment was replaced by absolute government-mandated chaos.

4- Leading politicians proved worthless– their ties to special interests blinded them to the impending disaster. Campaign contributions, patronage, and mutual back-scatching combined to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to speed hell-bent on piling up inflated worthless assets, the growth of which formed the basis for executive bonuses. Talk about the government rewarding bad behavior!

5- The executive branch was ineffective, or perhaps just drowned out by the above governmental bodies. However, one must suspect the Treasury Department, with its “good-ole-boys” connections to Wall Street, proved simply unequal to the task. And, somewhere along the way, they let the Glass-Steagel Act get emasculated. Home mortgages are too important to be given away willy-nilly and then bundled by speculators.

These are the known conclusions about today’s economic crisis that we do know–they do not require a doctorate in economics to comprehend. The causes of this chaos are almost all tracable to government interference in the free market–not a lack of regulation, but too much.

Is it possible that any ordinary Joe, even a Sarah Palin type of common sense, could have seen what all the elites in Washington failed to see. Wasn’t it a matter, not of failing to see what was actually very obvious, but of the elites simply not being willing to do what they didn’t want to do?