Leo-
Pearls to swine, baby.

œThe sub-prime problem was driven by Wall Street firms that needed a product to sell in securities tied to sub-prime mortgages, Moeling says. œThe Democratic political left love the idea of home-ownership, and the Republican political right love the idea of making money off home ownership. It was a perfect marriage where nobody wanted to say uncle or that the king had no clothes on
www.dealwatchblog.com/post/2008/09/17/La...all-Street-woes.aspx

There ya go.
And even in the meantime, there have
been about 50 years of people paying
more for the same property than they would
have, and then paying 2-5 times that excess
back to the creditor!! And that's before this
crisis, or even this decade.

[quote1226441152=Didymus]
I'm looking at the news this morning about the $700 BILLION bailout of Wallstreet, and the prospect of a Global Recession. Everyone agrees (even McCain has been forced to agree) that deregulation made this mess possible, and greed made it inevitable. So my question is this:
Moral conservativism has generally held that human beings are selfish by nature. Economic conservativism has generally championed the free market and deregulation. But how did anyone think these two, fundamental human greed and deregulation, could go together without producing the kind of result we are now facing? If you believe human nature is fundamentally selfish in the Hobbesian sense, you wouldn't give up having a police force or a military to defend your freedom, so why would anyone (any Hobbesian about human nature) think that a banking industry without strong oversight was a good idea? How could anyone think that the blind hand of the open market couldn't turn into a fist or a talon?
[/quote1226441152]

Since I've got a habbit of replying to the first post of dead topics...

A number of things:

1)
EVEN McCain? Well if that is the face of economic conservatism to you then I understand your confusion.

2)
It is very easy to explain why wanting as free a market as possible and a belief in the selfishness and corruptibility of humans go together:
IF humans are all selfish and corruptible, then the LAST thing you would want to do is give any small group (or any group for that matter) great power others. This would seem to be an obvious recipe for disaster. Giving such central power (in the form of economic planning and government regulation) has proven MANY times throughout history to be a disaster for human prosperity and freedom. Besides creating a vastly less prosperous economy, the power did not remain in the economic sphere alone.

3)
In this case as in past cases of economic problems the meddling hand of imperfect government is more the cause of problems than some lack of such meddling. It is a generally accepted fact that the Great Depression of years past was NOT a result of any special lack of government oversight in the economy, but rather was allowed to grow and in some senses fostered in growth by the central mismanagement of the Fed. (Similar circumstances had not turned into such depressions when the banking industry was not centrally controlled [notably in 1907 “the main motivation for the Fed systems creation--) The watered down (impossibly incorrect) version many high school textbooks present of a sudden stock market crash and an abrupt œthe world was then in a great depression scenario could not be more misleading.

4)
Judging economic conservatism or a belief in a free market economy by the actions of the current United States government, the actions or beliefs of currently popular politicians or just by the Republican Party in general are all, with no better way to say it, stupid. We do not have a real free market in the United States and really never have. It is just that ours has for most of its history been simply freer than many others.
If you™d like a better face to put on the ideals of a free market look into a Milton Friedman or a F.A. Hayek etc¦. Not McCain.

Bailout is only temporary solutions to cover what lost by financial or other industrial sectors. Bailout money is public money used to please rich sectors. Bailout does not mean better future of these sectors due to low financial demand from loss making or reduced output of industries. Final decision for moving economy is by the final customers who already have lost to high living cost. Improving citizens buying power would yield the result. Many factors are involved for the present banking and industrial crisis among them major reason is defaulting final customer. Think about:

¢ Present artificially escalated cost essential commodities through over speculative futures trading. Lacks of productive resources for investment, most investments are done in speculative unproductive sectors like housing, stock or other markets. These tend to create artificial demand and artificial price hike in hope more profitable business. Finally lack of demand from real needy customers dooms the market.
¢ Change economic pattern, both rural and urban economics be developed in same priority. Major Asian economies have gone into crisis as they relied on exports of basic commodities and manpower to developed countries resulting failures as have no demand in their own countries due to extensive poverty level.
¢ Generating employment in both rural and urban sectors is must for any economy to grow as a boost to generate demand.
¢ Finally any economic crisis or promotion is determined by the individuals of a country who buy and sell commodities or services. Country™s growth is based on the power of their individuals. Simply scaling down of inflation index or GDP growth on paper does not help real evaluation of actual growth of any economy. Inflation indexed increase or decrease is only to satisfy regulators themselves but for normal citizen it is the price of vegetable, cereal or any essential commodity that matters which practically rose by 200-300% whereas the inflation index indicates opposite to it or minor increase. (WPI) there is also variation of wholesale price and final price what a citizen pays for commodity, to get correct inflation figure retail price of the commodity that matters (CPI). Normal human has nothing to do with any high valued industrial commodities so inflation index need to classify essential and non essential commodity. Similarly, GDP growth indication too fails in countries where 50% of rural citizens are unemployed or semi-employed. Actual GDP grows when major portion of working population is engaged in production present industrial growth is beneficial to only limited nearly 5 to 10% of total population. A present economic indication criteria is totally baseless for a country which has among the largest poorest living population in the world.
www.sadashivan.com/quotpovertyquotasubject/index.html