Never do I want to hear again from my conservative friends about how brilliant capitalists are, how much they deserve their seven-figure salaries, and how government should keep its hands off the private economy.
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So they have stopped investing. The biggest, most respected investment firms threaten to come crashing down. You can't have that. It's just fine to make it harder for the average Joe to file for bankruptcy, as did that wretched bankruptcy bill passed by Congress in 2005 at the request of the credit card industry. But the big guys are "too big to fail" because they could bring us all down with them.
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Good God, you don't expect these people to trade in their BMWs for Saturns, do you?
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But if this near meltdown of capitalism doesn't encourage a lot of people to question the principles they have carried in their heads for the last three decades or so, nothing will.
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But in the enthusiasm for deregulation that took root in the late 1970s, flowered in the Reagan era and reached its apogee in the second Bush years, we forgot the lesson that government needs to keep a careful watch on what capitalists do. Of course, some deregulation can be salutary and the market system is, on balance, a wondrous instrument -- when it works. But the free market is just that: an instrument, not a principle.
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"We have been saying for so long that government is the enemy," Cohen said. "Government is the enemy until you need a friend." Then he added: "Is the public ready to say: 'Let the private sector handle everything'? Clearly not."

All Wall Street firms should be required to carve Cohen's words into their foundations before they crumble.


E.J. Dionne wrote an article in The Washington Post about Bailing out the Capitalists.

I'm not an economic expert, not even close, but I did disagree slightly to the bailout in my anti-corporation-government relations way. Quite possibly I just don't understand how the rewards corporations reap to governments outweigh all their negative, draining, illegal and immoral actions.

There are dozens of articles out there.

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