The First Four Black Sabbath Albums: Ooof, I wish there weren't so many tl;drers on Fark. TFA is basically about how we need an anti-big business movement rather than an anti-big government movement. We need to go after the big businesses, and TFA laid out how amazingly simple it is. I think the left and right can get behind this. For me, taking down giant corporations is a cause worth dying for.

I'm not interested in taking down Big Business. I just want the government to do its job in curbing the worst excesses of capitalism. The markets are not rational and when fear gives way to greed, we get what we had in 2008. Obviously, too much regulation is bad in that it stifles innovation and growth, but the current Republican idea of "We just need to do what we were doing in the years leading up to the collapse, only harder" is utterly insane.

One other thing: I HATE that the Tea Party has co- opted the Gadsden flag. You know what? There are people on both sides of the political fence that want to take away rights. It's just that the specific rights they want to take are different.

Your views intrigue me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Well at least the liberals would have the social awareness not to call themselves teabaggers.

GeneralJim: Greek: One other thing: I HATE that the Tea Party has co- opted the Gadsden flag. You know what? There are people on both sides of the political fence that want to take away rights. It's just that the specific rights they want to take are different.

This is a reasonably cogent statement, and I agree. I'm in favor of individual rights wherever possible; but, your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. I'm an ACTUAL libertarian. I'm slammed up against the left wall when it comes to personal rights, and slammed up against the right wall when it comes to economic rights. Oddly enough, when taking those political "tests," I end up as a moderate. *SNORK* That's the LAST thing I am.

That's because 1 dimensional tests are 1 dimensional. You're on the right fiscally and the left socially... which puts you smack dab in the middle. Take that 2 dimensional test the libertarian party puts out and see where you fall. (probably libertarian.) On that test, I'm firmly in the "liberal" square, but closer to libertarian than authoritarian. What can I say? I think there's some things that are better off managed by the government, and I think that government should serve the people, not the other way around, so lay the fark off my freedom to do whatever I want unless it hurts someone. Pretty simple, really.

One of the primary driving forces behind the growth of the subprime market was a desire by Wall Street to get out from under the thumb of Freddie and Fannie. They wanted an industry that was unregulated by the government where they could keep all of the profits themselves.

GeneralJim: putting people in power over others is so dangerous that it should be done only when absolutely necessary.

And what do you have in corporations? The same thing.

is to get government out of business as much as is possible.

And then you end up with people like Carnegie, Mellon et al.

GeneralJim: If I don't like an insurance product from one vendor, I can use another

And if every other product from every vendor is flawed in the same way?

GeneralJim: , I can pound sand.

Or you can just pay a fine.

So again, tell me how the government doing less to regulate the subprime market would have prevented the collapse?

GeneralJim: In this unlikely event, there is CERTAIN to already be government meddling in the market. But, if it is a feature wanted by a reasonable number of people, there WILL be a product to fit that want. And, in the unlikely event that there isn't, YOU could offer one.

Even after the new risk models began percolating through the industry, many companies still refused to get into subprime because of the risk associated with it. However, as companies like CountryWide and AmeriQuest began making billions in profits, resistors came under intense pressure to jump in. In part, it was investors demanding it, in part it was because they were losing customers to the subprime leaders. It quickly became a race to the bottom where even skeptical lenders felt it was necessary to get into subprime just to keep up with the competition.

In other words, the government failed to adequately regulate the financial industry. When left to their own devices, that same industry blew up the economy.

No, the government did not force Wall Street to make bad loans. Wall Street took the government mandate to increase homeownership to riskier borrowers, found a way to make billions off of it, and then started making bad loans. Wall Street bacame so addicted to the profits being generated by derivatives that even after the market started cooling in 2006, they continued making bad loans for another 2 years because to do otherwise would have destroyed them. And again, most subprime loans were for refinancings by people who already owned homes, so even that mandate went out the window once the money started flowing.

And if less regulation would have had no effect on the final outcome, why are you insisting on less? Isn't "less is better" the entire basis of your argument?

The government never said, "Make bad loans and we don't care if they fail or if you lose money!"

GeneralJim: This rush of unqualified buyers suddenly buying houses caused housing prices to rise

To be fair, though, this was mostly flippers and miscellaneous idiots of all creeds and colors, rather than "blacks." Nobody has yet shown that CRA-mandated loans had any real effect on the crisis at all.

The CRA encouraged banks to give mortgages to qualified borrowers in areas where they normally wouldn't lend money, chiefly because property values were low and they wouldn't see such mortgages as worth it

Why did it take so long for anyone to say anything if it was so bad?

You know how I know you are old and likely from the Deep South?

GeneralJim: It didn't. You're forgetting that it was Republicans warning about risks from Democratic programs. The warnings, including a SYSTEMIC warning from the Bush administration about Fannie and Freddie, in 2003, saying problems could be larger than the financial industry, were ignored by media, for the most part. Listen to the Republicans warn, and the Democrats deny, HERE. (new window)

Phil Graham didn't seem to worried about the risk when he was pushing to remove all of the regulatory roadblocks to building the subprime market. His wife Wendy as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission didn't seem too concerned about the risk when she declared that derivatives were not futures and thus could not be regulated by her agency. Alan Greenspan, king of the Objectivists, adored the unregulated derivatives market. George W. Bush didn't seem too concerned when he presented his "Blueprint for the American Dream" that promoted minority home ownership. And his "war" with Freddie and Fannie was more about the Republican dream of gutting the GSE's so that they couldn't stand in the way of the free market and about protecting the Administration in the wake of the Enron scandal.

piperTom
GeneralJim nails it. Huzzah!

The problem is that all capitalism turns into crony capitalism. How do you think we got here?

Hmm... highlighting his own words in a different color, even in quotes... referring to himself as "Gentle"...

I think we got ourselves a Messiah here, folks.

GeneralJim
By giving government control over markets, and then propping up dumbass companies that SHOULD have gone teats up.

1) I hate your green font. You just look like a giant AW.



Eat Me

2) We supposedly started with this perfect, ideal free-market democratic republic blah blah 200+ years ago. If it was really so perfect, how did it end up as it is now? Wouldn't uncritically going back to that arrangement just result in the same mess as today sooner or later, since in an iterative system (aka 'reality') future results are emergent from previous results?