I remember a time not so long ago when you openly admitted to not knowing much about economics, and it is evident from your sycophantic fluff piece on Mr Paulson here that this state of affairs persists. The real question is how and why you still have a column. What exactly is the point here? That Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi love corporate welfare just as much as Republicans? We already knew that. It's also hard not to imagine we might all be a lot better off if we stopped letting ex-Goldman Sachs executives run the US treasury for the benefit of their fellow multi-millionaires. I could get conventional "wisdom" such as you have dispensed here ("the left and the right both dislike him, so he must've done something correct") from my grandmother's kitchen, and probably a lot more astute "economic analysis."

Seriously.

"First, I turn on the TV...Then I come to Salon...The country's gone....idiotic hysteria...hypocrites and idiots."

"Maybe America deserves to fail as a country..."

"the wingnuts...crazy, uneducated, fear mongerers...I never thought I would see my country so stupid."

"Naziism without the broken glass....School districts as the KKK....Thoroughly Kafkaesque....We are becoming a pathetic nation."

"these radical assholes...socialized healthcare will keep me from losing my home....The rest of the world is laughing at us."

"a nation without patriots is doomed to fail -- to rot from the inside....more importantly...we deserve to be."

And, finally, my favorite line in the midst of this reality-based orgy, regarding Obama: "he's anything but controversial"

Russell Jones R.I.P

But he was a sympathizer.

What self-serving tripe. I suppose if you ignore Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Jefferson, and all the signatories to the United States Constitution, you could make your ridiculous case.

"De-regulation" caused the current economic crisis? Tell that to the SEC lawyer who is married to Bernie Madoff's niece.

There is a stack of financial regulations a mile high that easily could have been enforced before the current crisis reached this point. But what Democratic partisans don't want to admit is that the FDIC, the SEC, the FTC, and all the new regulatory bureaucracies in the world that Rahm Emanuel can stack with relatives don't make a damn bit of difference when you have decidedly UN-libertarian plutocrats running the government--and that includes Clinton, Bush, and now, as any intellectually honest liberal would already acknowledge, we are seeing with Obama. More of the same.

But yes, let's blame the libertarian kooks.

I hope united opposition to problems that are increasingly perceived in common across the political spectrum will be enough to bring about the political re-alignment that is so desperately needed right now.

The Ron Paul movement (http://www.campaignforliberty.org) should not be associated with the nutcase Glenn Beck. GOP "leadership" and the usual partisan hacks have latched onto Dr. Paul's methods but not (yet) his message.

They see in retrospect that the fact of Dr. Paul raising $4 million in a single day without any help from the GOP establishment might mean something important, and they are trying to glom onto that true grassroots momentum and parasitically co-opt it. But we activists who supported the message and not just the brand name will not let that happen.

Thanks for the article.

...were hiding in the same place that the mysteriously-vanished anti-war protesters are hiding now that Obama is in office.

How anyone can claim that America has been in the throes of a sinister "free-market" ideology when we've had agencies like the IRS, the ATF, the DEA, the FTC, the SEC, the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, et al for several decades or more, is beyond me.

I guess different people have different definitions of "free." To libertarian economists, freedom means the freedom to fail. Government propping up failed institutions with tax dollars is not a "free-market" system. It's actually closer to something called "fascism."

Anyone who expects the Man from Chicago and his sidekicks the Emanuel brothers to save the American economic system from itself with more government regulation is truly living in a dreamworld.

Government regulation in America exists for the same reason it exists everywhere: to protect politically-favored big business and stifle competition. Even I-banks in America haven't been operating in a "free-market" system by any means. Just ask Richard Fuld, who was destroyed by a former business rival (and Goldman Sachs CEO) acting in a "regulatory capacity" who happened to be the Treasury Secretary.

We need more regulation like that? All these Federal agencies need to be dismantled, starting with the Fed and working our way up.

And the current economic crisis is a textbook case study in the accuracy of Austrian economic theory. That's why people like Peter Schiff accurately predicted the exact dimension and chronology of the recession years before it happened. Watch the video footage for yourself if you don't believe it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw

Out of what orifice are you pulling this line of crap? The Illegal Immigrant Census?

You argument amounts to nothing more than a perfect reason (among many others) to enforce our existing immigration laws and keep undocumented immigrants out.

Not to welcome it and make it feel nice and comfy at home. You might want to re-think your brilliant analogy. Nobody is denying the existence of illegal immigration--far from it. We're talking about what should be done about it. Should we reward and subsidize it, or try and stanch it?

Sure...in New York, LA, Chicago, Miami etc. but there's still plenty of places in America where actual Americans--black, white, brown and yellow--still do these things, either for themselves or by paying other American citizens--or legal residents--to do them. Sorry to burst your lily-white, spoiled, self-centered ivory bubble.