"But what deregulation has wrought is too many low-interest, high-risk loans."

So is easy money low interest or high interest? I thought the cheap/easy dichotomy you are presenting has to do with difficult-to-get low interest loans versus eminently accessible high interest loans. Your above statment stands in contradiction to this.

I still think that you are underestimating the role that artificially low interest rates, coupled with reckless government spending, played in all of this. It was these policies, pursued by the federal government, that distorted market signals and created the atmosphere that incentivized the kinds of reckless financial practices that led to the emergence of too many loans, be they low or high interest, for the economy to sustain. This was not just the market doing what it does in the absence of regulation. This was the market doing what it does when the government directly attempts to manipulate it for a particular outcome. And Joe Conason is prescribing more of the same.

Roderick Long over at The Art Of The Possible says more eloquently, knowledgeably, and extensively, what I have been saying here. Below is the link to his post.

http://www.theartofthepossible.net/2008/10/09/regulation-the-cause-not-the-cure-of-the-financial-crisis/

The problem with Ron Paul is that he is a firm believer in the Constitution as it was originally written - the antebellum Constitution of 1860. I respect his admiration for the original document, and think he has a number of good points about how it is not being followed in this day and age the way it ought to be, particularly with regard to the commerce clause and the express limitations on federal power. However, his eloquent statements in defense of the Constitution, and the original intentions of the Framers, never seems to take into account the 14th or 16th Amendments, what Congress had in mind when they were passed, and what that implies for the Consitution as the Framers intended it.

....that most people didn't get - including, apparently, both Heather Havrilesky and Stephanie Zacharek - is that it wasn't actually about racism. It was about isolation, and the jarring and disruptive acts that it drives people to. Race was just the divide that was used to tell those stories.

Don Cheadle, at the beginning of the movie, says something to the effect of "people don't touch each other in this city. I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just so we can feel something." That, in a nutshell, is what the movie was about. It had a lot of subtlety to it. You just had to look beyond the obvious to see it.

That being said, I can't imagine a whole television series being based on that. And since I don't get Starz, I guess I'll never see if they manage to pull it off.

....for taking this stand. This is the most important issue out there that nobody is willing to touch. You are the first major non-libertarian columnist that I am aware of to do so. Bravo.

The war on drugs - which is the closest thing we have to a modern Inquisition - underlies ALL of our other major problems. It is the ONE thing that is keeping America from being a truly free, prosperous, and stable Republic. Want to eliminate street gangs, prison gangs, the federal deficit, exploding health care costs, ballooning prison populations, the erosion of our civil rights, the increasing militarization of our police forces, regional instability in Central America, and a big chunk of Al-Qaeda's budget, all in one fell swoop? All of this can be accomplished with this single stroke of the pen.

Here's hoping more media types read this and join in the chorus.

So why aren't any left wing politicians willing to touch this idea? There clearly is popular support for it from a big and growing section of left wing America. Is this just a case of the emperor having no clothes?

I know Kucinich and Paul have both publicly taken this position on the drug war, and Dodd edged toward decriminalizaton of Marijuana at one of the debates (at which point, Edwards scoffed at him). Has Feingold said anything on this? Has Leahey? Has Sanders? Has Barney Frank? Has Barbara Boxer?

If not, then why?

I couldn't agree with you more that the kind of small government that the Republican party has advocated over the past thirty years is selective, hypocritical, and ultimately incompatible with their law and order sympathies.

My point was that, if you take a look at the letters posted to this article - which are almost unanimously in support of it - you can see that there is a large and growing left wing contingency in favor of this, and yet there are no left wing politicians answering to this contingency.

Not that I'm exonerating him in all of this, but:

(1) Isn't Congress, and not the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the only entity empowered to regulate, or deregulate, the financial industry? Doesn't the Chairman of the Fed have to play within their rules, and not the other way around?

And

(2) In his Ayn Rand acolyte days, Greenspan called for eliminating the Federal Reserve and returning to the gold standard. Thus, doesn't his whole tenure at the Federal Reserve stand as a contradiction to, and not an example of, his Ayn Rand influenced philosophy of money and finance?