| > The huge military for starters, all that money that goes via the military to the industries that supply it. Money straight in to jobs. Jobs which create guns and bullets which are fired and kill people and do absolutely nothing for the betterment of man and do nothing (or very little) to increase productivity. In other words, this is a great example of the broken window fallacy. > what the anti socialists seem very keen to forget is that this all kicked off with subprime loans, badly regulated, free market loans, not government loans or spending. So you're just going to ignore all the government encouragement along the way? You're going to ignore the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, mortgage deductions, and everything else the government has done in the past half century to encourage home ownership? You're just going to ignore the very low interest lates proceeding the dot-com bust? You're going to ignore the implicit bailout guarantees provided by the government and the FDIC? You're going to ignore all the regulation that encouraged too-big-to-fail banks to grow and continue to exist? No, the housing crisis was a joint effort. It was, as I've heard described best, the private market getting drunk off booze provided by the government. The private and the public sector both messed up. Derivative packaging and trading and all of that was certainly ugly. But you cannot possibly blame this on the free market (because free it wasn't) and you cannot absolve the government of responsibility. To do so would be irresponsible itself. > I assume the anti socialists wanted the banks to fail? It was government policy that encouraged their creation, so yes. Of course. > So, we do like government spending when it suits. Government spending to solve a problem created by the government. Brilliant. > So, one cannot complain about the spending when it was the money provider, capitalism, that screwed up in the first place, leaving no money to spend. No. Just no. This is like saying capitalism caused the Great Depression. See above. |