Underlining Mark Thirlwell's point about the multitude of opinions with regards to the current economic crisis is this video of Naomi Klein and Joseph Stiglitz:

Liberal commentator Naomi Klein blames Alan Greenspan for the current economic crisis, citing the former Federal Reserve Chairman's push to deregulate financial systems such as derivatives markets as a key element of the crisis.



Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticizes American financial leadership in the run-up to the current economic crisis, and declares free-market fundamentalism "dead" as a guiding principle of the U.S. economy.



Full video is at http://fora.tv/2008/10/20/Naomi_Klein_and_Joseph_Stiglitz_on_Economic_Power

Interesting guy, seems to be after some real answers not talking head yellings and goings ons. Be Googling him and them some.

+1 for the NWO LOL

I'd say they're all three correct. Thirlwell is entirely right about most economists right now -- they're criticizing what came before without putting forth a new theory (or plan of action) to guide us in the future.

Klein is also right; the derivatives market is a prime example of what happens when capitalists are truly left to their own devices -- a mess of hideously complex, opaque interactions that pile up until no free market actor can accurately gauge risk, reward, or value, much less make reasonable predictions about the future state of their investment.

Stiglitz is also right about corporate welfare being the real paradigm of the Bush administration, though their rhetoric had swept in some market fundamentalists too. Compromise between those two camps leads to things like the 3-page Paulson plan or the "equity injection" with no nationalization that are worse than what they'd do if they'd just been pure market fundamentalists or purely corrupt corporate socialists.

I think the real failure is that the corporate socialists didn't realize they were socialists. It's like someone told them wealth would "trickle down", as if that was some sort of law of economic gravity.

It seems that no ideology frees people from having to react to situations intelligently. They need to learn that rather than creating hard, fast rules for dealing with economics as a whole (e.g. less government is always better), they need to apply some common sense to what role government plays, and how people will really behave when left to their own devices.

I'm somewhat inclined to push for sports rule-makers take over the government. They don't seem to get into this asinine debate about "more rules" or "less rules", they just go with what works, and get rid of what doesn't, and listen when people bitch at them for getting it wrong.

I think that's how democracy is supposed to work, and for the life of me I don't know how things got so far off course.