Magnifisyncopathological

What makes capitalism different from socialism?

What differentiates free market economics from other theories of economics?

What does unregulated, laissez-faire, and hands off mean?

"The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices.

The regulatory failure is rooted in a markets-are-good-government-is-bad ideology that has been ascendant as long as Mr. McCain has been in Washington and championed by his own party."

"The only thing that is certain is that the era of the unbridled free-market economy in the US has passed -- at least for now."

"Despite all the regulators in place, the current system overlooks many of the most important transactions. Half of our financial markets--controlling some $10 trillion in assets--are barely regulated at all. These entities include investment banks, hedge funds, and mortgage companies (which are not banks but made the bulk of subprime mortgages)."

"When dyed-in-the-wool capitalist institutions like Lehman's go begging for state subsidies, it's an admission that pure capitalism has limitations that only regulation can handle."

"While I am a free-market advocate, I am also for creating regulations that eliminate speculators who destroy the value of individual stocks and bonds."

"This will come to be seen as the greatest regulatory failure in modern history."

"The worst outcome of all this piecemeal, after-the-fact doctoring of a chaotic situation is that all this financial peril could have been prevented if government overseers had not allowed financial institutions to run amok."

Have their senses have failed or are their rational faculties faulty?

No one emotion is overwhelming another for me right now. My worry about my retirement account (average fund performance since this time last year: -15%) fades when I hear some asshole on TV begging for a politician to whip up A Plan To Save Us All. My exasperation at generations of backwards economic thought is overruled when I bitterly think of the billions of people getting the wrong impression of what results from an alleged free market.

That last is perhaps my greatest fear. What remaining sensible mainstream advice is getting utterly drowned out by screaming for bans, rules, imposed order, and increased state authority. Those "reforms" will be the equivalent of pushing the walls of a trench up higher with little regard for the unyielding nature of gravity.

Things will get worse.