| I think it's more our current ruling class than the system per se, although that depends on how you define "system". No system can work if you have fools running it. Our big C Constitutional system has worked better in times past when better people were in office ... and worked worse when worse people were in, e.g. Hoover and FDR making their economic mess worse and prolonging and worsening the agony. It's just not that bad yet. While e.g. Cash for Clunkers was pure "broken window" bogus economics, do we have anything quite as vile as the Agricultural Department destroying food and preventing its production while at the same time they calculate 1/4 of the nation is malnourished (which the DoD confirmed in the WWII draft)? Well, maybe this is as perverse, although not hardly as vile. As grellas details in some length, in a period of bad economic times (starting with the dot.com crash) our ruling class as seen fit to steadily destroy the foundations for startups. And it's a general bipartisan thing, e.g. a ruling class problem. There are, realistically (ignoring the rosy projections of going below a trillion in FY 12, a Presidential election year), trillion dollar annual Federal deficits stretching out as far as the eye can see. Where is this money going to come from? Not from new enterprises and new industries, there will be few if any new Apples, Suns or Googles ... hmmm, Microsoft managed to bootstrap itself, but such opportunities don't come along often and the computers and their components that ran Microsoft Basic and so on were largely/almost entirely not self-funded. Bleah. |