If socialism (?) is not your cup of tea, did you approve of my money being used to bail out AIG and so on? what is that if not socialism? But that was ok because jut \temporary? What then of what you would call “the free market”? How free is it?

Fred, you’re missing the point. Everything you’re listing represents the results of socialism. IOW, govt – in the form of Democrats – decided to involve itself in the free market by mandating that banks begin lending hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of people who couldn’t afford to pay that money back. On top of that, in order to further facilitate the Ponzi scheme, Democrats used Fannie and Freddie to grease the wheel by agreeing to have the two entities simply buy up all of those bad loans – banks would never have gone along with it if they were actually required to hold onto to these mortgages.

the govt rewarded me with jmoney for that which as a citizen I should have done as a good citizen…I helped me. It helped me and the G.I. (socilaims Bil_) helped a lot of others

This is an expenditure, not socialism.

Govt subsidies to the oil industry and the farmers is price suppots, and that, for better or worse, is socialism and not the free market at work.

Again, not socialism…expenditures. And they’re expenditures that serve a national security interest. For example, in a global economy, American farmers simply cannot compete with the prices that poorer nations can set for food products. Without some sort of support, the American farm would disappear completely.

Now, do you think it would be a good idea to have our nation totally dependent on foreign countries for our food? I didn’t think so. It would be just as bad of an idea as hiring a foreign country to provide our military protection.

First of all, Republicans (our supposed conservatives) have had extensive control within the government up until recently.

Pay Attention very ably points out the fact that “govt” is not simply a group of elected officials – as a matter of fact, elected officials make up a very small part of our federal govt. Also, “control” is a very loose term when you’re talking about Republicans, because not only are they fighting the Democrats, they are also in a never-ending war with the US news media. And while the majority of the American public may understand that the US news media is biased to the Left, they don’t understand that their bias includes one-sided reporting, intentional omission of information that’s harmful to Democrats or the leftist agenda, and outright falsity…IOW, a good 80+% of the American public still trusts the information they get from the US news media as basically true and accurate.

EX: in 1996, Republicans led an effort to repeal the CRA because they rightly foresaw that forcing lenders into making inherently risky loans opened the institutions up to the risk of significant losses and even complete failure. They failed in their effort. Why? 1) Because unless a party has a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate AND control of the White House, that party doesn’t have “control” of anything. The Republicans had neither. 2) Also – and probably more importantly – the US news media let it be known that if Republicans pushed too hard on this matter, that they would proceed to excoriate them in public as racists and anti-poor/middle class.

Another point regarding Conservatives love for deregulation. Less regulation is always preferable to more — when POSSIBLE. Let’s keep in mind that NO regulation is anarchy.

Again, you’re seeing the world through glasses that are tinted with Leftist ideology.

No one claims that there should be NO regulation; however, what regulation there is should be concerned with protecting individual Americans from having their Constitutional rights infringed upon…it should not be concerned with social tinkering through pricing controls, etc.

At a lesser extreme (but unfortunately real), too little regulation and suddenly we find ourselves with several corporate entities that were too big to fail, in fact failing.

Again, it wasn’t too little regulation that caused this crisis…it was too much govt interference

Furthermore we find that somehow these corps are ‘critical’ to the US economy and require govt intervention. I’m sorry but no corporate entity should ever be allowed to achieve a position that would threaten the US economy if it were to fail. I’ll take regulation over that scenario any day of the week.

I don’t mean to be insulting, Fred, but you’re perfectly illustrating the failures of our Leftist-dominated educational system and news media.

Again, the damage that was done to these so-called “critical” industries wasn’t the result of normal market forces – they were the result of socialist tinkering in a free market economy that has spent hundreds of years developing and perfecting the economic rules by which they operate. In a normal economic environment, what happened would have been impossible.

Look, prior to the 1990s, the reason banks weren’t lending hundreds of thousands of dollars in home loans to poor people wasn’t because they were black or Hispanic or whatever…it was because the realities of their economic circumstances (i.e. salaries, savins, loan-to-debt ratios, credit scoring, etc.) did not meet the underwriting standards that have been accumulated over hundreds of years of financial history.

But what the Democrats did in the 1990s was say “we don’t care about any of that…human beings have a right to own a home and we are going to use the law to force you banks to give these people money to buy homes”. They forced the US banking system – which is the underpinning of the US economy – to deviate from their normal business practices in order to pursue an ideological agenda.

The best way to think about what happened to the financial markets is this: what the Democrats did with their social tinkering in these markets is no different than someone who poisons their spouse with arsenic. A little arsenic here (a few thousand sub-prime loans)…a little arsenic there (a few more thousand sub-prime loans)…and there’s no noticeable effects. But as the arsenic levels slowly increase (hundreds of thousands of sub-prime loans…month after month, year after year), the adverse effects begin showing up (increased foreclosures, increasing inventories of houses, over-leveraged companies). Then, finally, a critical juncture is reached and the body begins to fail, and the problem is that by the time this happens, the arsenic has critically damaged all the bodies organs (the problems in the financial system spread throughout the entire economy). Finally, death occurs (market collapse).

Now, in the arsenic example: do you blame the human body for not being able to process the arsenic? Of course not. You blame the spouse who introduced the arsenic the person’s body. And since that’s the case, why do you blame the US economy for not being able to process the poison that Democrats introduced into the system?

Also, if I were you, I’d be much more worried about the lethal – and completely unstoppable – threat that an ever-expanding federal bureaucracy poses to the US economy. For example, the coming Social Security/Medicare nightmare: where by 2050, $1 out of every $5 that the US economy creates in a given year will have to go towards paying for just those TWO entitlements.

You haven’t seen damage yet. And there won’t be any “bailout” to fall back on.

Finally, as much as I detest Obama’s platform, he is not any more socialist than the next guy.

Really? Does “the next guy” usuallly have a famous member of the Communist Party USA (i.e. Frank Marshall Davis) as a teenage mentor?

Does “the next guy” usually have a Harvard-educated, communist father who sought to influence the Kenyan govt to adopt 1) 100% taxation, 2) communal farms & the elimination of private farming, 3) the nationalization of businesses owned by “Europeans” and “Asians”, and 4) “active” measures to bring about a classless society.

Does “the next guy” usually have a “spiritual mentor” who is an adherent to the marxist-informed Black Liberation Theology?

Does “the next guy” usually have a decade long relationship with domestic terrorists who are avowed communists? And who he worked with by spending $100+ million in an effort at indoctrinating school children into a Leftist ideology?

If you can find even one other American – period – with the same amount of historical ties to various communists as Barack Obama has, color me impressed.