[jamieb]

Whenever it got sluggish, the sys admins eagerly added memory and processors, not bothering to consider what might be wrong. And when the box finally collapsed the sysadmins are more than happy that all the anger is directed at the hackers.

This would be a reasonable analogy if the hackers (bankers) hadn't spent the last decade paying the sysadmins (congress) to remove the safeties and add vulnerabilities.

Indeed you say this as if in the computer world, the idea of hackers just paying a sysadmin for access would be unimaginable. Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

[mseebach]

And of course the analogy is flawed, as analogies tend to be.

Yes, what has happened essentially amounts to corruption. How do you usually approach corruption, by going after the corrupted officials or the people paying the bribes? Both, especially at this scale, but no-one expects corruption to go away while there are corruptible officials.

> Certainly it appears that you haven't thought of it.

It might appear so, but appearances can be deceptive. By all means, lets have a debate based on what the other side appears to think.

[jamieb]

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

You responded with a statement that the bankers did not do so, and that in fact the politicians had caused the damage, and then blamed the bankers. A direct contradiction of my assertion.

You are now claiming that "of course the analogy is flawed". No sir. The analogy was effective. It was the logical conclusion that you made using the analogy that was wrong, and you now admit so.

I stand by my analogy. Our economic system has been rooted.

How to fix it? How can we do that, when the people writing the laws are the ones who would be jailed by them?

[CWuestefeld]

I stated explicitly that the bankers had bribed the politicians.

It seems to me that it was mutual, sort of a ouroboros snake swallowing its tail. Just as we could say that bankers offered promises to politicians in order to secure favorable regulations, so did the politicians offer favorable regulation in order to secure their own re-election. As far as I can see, they're two sides of the same coin.

That being the case, it doesn't make sense to demand that the politicians wield great power in order to exercise greater control over the bankers. We know that the politicians are corrupt, so why would we give them more power?