[CWuestefeld]

The tax cuts of the last 30 years have been accompanied by massive deregulation and cuts to social services. Society has taken a huge right-ward tilt, conservatives have gotten everything they wanted.

Sigh. We just got the biggest increase in entitlement programs in more than two generations. The government claims it's cutting spending, but actually it won't be any smaller, they've only decelerate slightly. In the meantime, the regulatory state is thriving. I challenge you to name an industry that one could safely enter without needing to learn myriad details of what the government demands of businesses in that industry. This is not an age of deregulation, and GWB was no friend of small government nor of the free market.

NOT A SINGLE BANKER WAS FIRED OR PROSECUTED, ... The government is in their back pocket, they do as they want.

The banking meltdown was due to the banking industry taking some unconscionable risks, but it was also due to the regulators themselves pushing the banking industry to take risks. Industry is also in the back pocket of the government, as business leaders vie for the advantages that government bequeaths. Yet how many politicians and bureaucrats have been held accountable for the debacle?

We are living in your vision of the world.

You have no idea how wrong you are. You seem to be drawing a mental picture of the political world that follows the narrative told by the main stream media, but that's so gross an oversimplification as to be useless. The political spectrum is not one of Liberals versus Conservatives. So when you assume that, because I'm arguing against your Liberal stance, I must be a Conservative, is just plain wrong.

There are many ways to look at the political world. Taking the simplistic view is not going to help you solve any problems, any more than you'll be able to debug your software if you don't understand how the machine, your compiler, the network protocols, etc., work.

First, you should understand that the vast majority of the people in politics and in the business world are not evil. They are just people like you and I, responding to the problems and incentives in front of them, trying to make a life for themselves and their families. The size and complexity of the system makes it less clear where the line between right and wrong is, and easy to fudge for any particular action. While the structure of the system today makes it all too compelling to make the wrong choice.

Your insistence that so many of your neighbors are evil -- when they know that they're not, and just doing their best -- is going to make anyone you disagree with defensive. That'll prevent you from changing any minds, and instead just widen the political chasm that we suffer from today. I beg you, take a step back from the incrimination, and try to understand what's going on as the collective work of many individuals, each responding to situations put in front of them.

[guelo]

Do you ever stop and wonder why it is that your ideology so closely aligns exactly with everything that the big corps and banks want? You want deregulation just like the big polluters do, you want lower taxes just like the richest want, you want to remove any policing of business activities, guess who doesn't want business activities to be policed? The fantasy that the banking meltdown was caused by Fannie or some laws passed 30 years ago don't even pass the smell test. For some reason you can't imagine that it had anything to do with the banking deregulation passed in 2000. Somehow anything that might benefit the lower and middle class is a threat but we must keep the most powerful on the dole.

By the way you are distancing yourself from "conservatives" I'm guessing you are one of the self-proclaimed libertarians. But as far as the practical economical results it's the same crap, policies that end up making the powerful even more powerful than they are now.

I'm not assuming that you are evil, and I don't have some simplistic view of the world that you are attributing to me. But there are people that are taking advantage of the rest of us and we should be fighting it. We all live in a world flooded by propaganda coming at us from all sides so I always try to give people some leeway when arguing politics, and I try to stay informed on opinions opposed to mine. It is hard to break free from pre-concieved notions.

The liberal vs conservative (or libertarian) debate on economics has been about whether the bigger villain are big corps or big government. But I think what the new realization dawning on millions of people, especially those that thought Obama would fight against the plutocrats, is that they are both part of the same corrupt and broken system. You want to break apart big government, fine, but why don't you also want to break up the big banks and other monopolies?