This kind of talk is just sad to hear from you:

Whether or not this is true (and I don’t profess to know the answer), it will be a long time before the world tries them again on such a grand scale.

The problem that we witnessed in this country wasn’t capitalism. It wasn’t buying an oxen to plow the field to raise grain to sell at the market, and then using the proceeds to buy some goats to milk and make some cheese for your family and sell the rest of that at the market, and then build a nicer house.

The problem that we witnessed was deep in the heart of the mortgage brokers and the banks and the government who encouraged people to buy houses based on mortgages they could never afford, and in many cases which they couldn’t afford to live in, based on the promise that they could always refinance and sell them at a higher price. The problem that we had was debauchery. Investment houses participated by developing mechanisms to attempt to sell that risk. We started doing crazy things like giving credit cards to people who don’t have social security numbers and weren’t even citizens.

The problem wasn’t capitalism in the sense of: “If you have a product to sell you sell it at the market price. If you can’t make a profit, then you can’t sell it and the price goes down, and you shouldn’t be making the product.” The problem was that the system was ginned so that products people never should have been “selling” was the only thing anyone was interested in.

Your take on Randall Hoven’s article in AT yesterday:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/how_did_this_happen.html

He asks a very good question: “How did a drop of a percent or two in US home prices cause whole countries in Europe to go bankrupt?” And in particular, why did this hit Europe harder than, and before, the effects were felt in the US?

We’ve explored the political causes and effects of the Fannie/Freddie debacle, but what was the proximate source and cause of the half-a-trillion-dollar run on the dollar in mid-September, in the middle of a campaign?

You don’t often miss Black, but on this one you’re dead wrong. The deep thinkers aren’t questioning, the loud mouthed posers are. The unintelligent intelligentsia who never gave up their longing for the perfect socialist paradise are the loud mouths claiming that capitalism has failed, when it is their policies that have caused the mess we are in. The requirements to loan to people who couldn’t afford the loans because they happened to belong to a class enabled under anti-discrimation law couldn’t be rationalized into the system. So the system expanded it to people who weren’t covered under the law and further expanded the risk. And then since no sane person would hold the risk associated with it, it got sliced, diced, and pureed into “exotic instruments” because we all know the poison is in the dose, so as long as you dilute the poison it is no longer toxic. And it worked for a while, which encouraged riskier and riskier loans because after all, you can’t be sitting on the sidelines when there’s money to be made. So the ratio of toxicity in the exotic instruments got higher and higher until they finally crossed the toxicity threshold. Only now, instead of having isolated islands of toxicity that could be cut out and removed, the poison is in the whole system. Because that’s what the socialists were after in the first place, and have been since socialism first made it’s appearance in England and the US under the banner of Progressivism way back when Wilson was president, and maybe even before that. It will grant the vanishingly small possibility that some actors in this drama didn’t know why they were doing what they were doing, but the principalities behind them certainly did. And I’m quite convinced that no small number, including George Soros, were quite aware of what they were doing, because they think they are smarter than all the rest of us put together, and if only we will bend our knee to their superior intellect, all will be right with the world.

The worlds real deep thinkers (Hayek, Freidman, et al) have already solved this problem. And their cures have already been tested by Reagan, and yes, even John F. Kennedy with the results having bee written into history. Applied again they will remove the poison and we can regain our economic prosperity. Following the proven failures of Carter and Roosevelt under the allegedly benign guidance of The Anointed One will only worsen the sickness. To cure the problem, speak it loudly, clearly, and defiantly: Free markets are the answer, not the problem. Government intervention is only required to make them transparent, not fair, and even then only to the extent necessary for them to be transparent.

I get Investor’s Business Daily editorials, in Sept 2008 they said that everyone with real capital gains took all $ out of stock market because they wanted to pay cap gains tax in 2008 ratess, not in Obama’s rates,

Do we know what those cap gains rates are? I ignored him, stil. do, as much as possible,

To all of yiou, get IBD editorials, they are free and provocing to me. I wish there was spell check here.

Stock market under 7,000 is why Holder released classified GWB documents. The one wants attention, so does Emanuel,