[nknight]

I have two very simple questions for you:

1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out?

2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?

[JoshTriplett]

1) No. I also don't consider said bailouts the root cause of anything except one more instance of wasteful spending.

2) "Too busy fighting over local minima/maxima to ever escape them and make core changes, but as a result at least mostly harmless except as a drag force on productivity." We could argue all day about core changes that might fix the system, but we'll never agree on precisely which core changes to make, so they'll never happen. And that still probably works better than the case where the wrong core changes occur.

(And a meta-level comment about search heuristics comes about as close to a political comment as I'd like to get.)

[Jgrubb]

I'll throw two out there -

1. Campaign finance reform. Debate the details, but you can't debate that there should be some.

2. Vastly greater oversight/transparency, if not an outright ban of the current lobbying system.

[mike_organon]

Both of your answers ask for more government control. Consider the government is a huge concentration of power, so many will want to corrupt it. Our goal should be to reduce the power of government, thereby reducing corruption.

[nknight]

The bailouts are a result of brokenness, I never said they were a property. But I think we have rather different ideas of what "fundamental" means, if you're arguing that it's not fundamentally broken, but that "core changes are necessary".

I guess I'll leave it at that.

[mseebach]

1) No

2) Because bail-outs aren't a fundamental property of "the system".

[euccastro]

Bail-outs are a symptom of plutocracy, which is very much the fundamental nature of the American system (amongst many others).

[nknight]

They are a result of the system. I find it hard to believe that a not-fundamentally-broken system would produce that result.

What non-fundamental properties of the system do you think should change to halt now, and prevent in the future, bailouts and related actions (e.g. corporate subsidies)?