It's like socialism -- "Great idea! Too bad nobody's ever tried it."

and everyone else that sees our current predicament as the root cause of capitalism. We don not have true capitalism, we have crony capitalism at best, which coincidentally has been sleeping with the government for years. Fannie Freddie anyone?

So now because of all the loses this year everyone thinks we should turn a bit more socialistic.. yea... so you think the government who has been a facilitator in all this will make it better?

Everyone just wants to find a single "thing" to pin it all on.

Pin it on the human condition. No matter what collective system we set up, people will be people and the same things will occur.

I think of the economic systems that have come about, capitalism is still the best way to allocate resources. You can not centrally plan an economy from the top down. It leads too misappropriation of resources.

Please Andrew, stop saying its capitalism. If we go socialist and in 30 years we have a crisis again, then what? Who's to blame?

Is not an indictment of the entirety of economics since the early 18th Century. After all Mugabe is an avowed Marxist and no one here would dare criticize that based on the death of a few million Zimbabweans, would they? That would be unfair.

Anyway a large number of charities, non profits and foundations just went broke as a result of this. So.....I guess they should turn to the government for a bailout next? Otherwise we're implying to those charities "Screw you people...."

Why, he Madoff with them, of course.

Ark. Ark. Ark.

It's been known since before the invention of money that the easiest way to steal is to exploit the greed of the victim. It doesn't work all the time, of course, and it doesn't have to. But it works particularly well with Americans.

That's because the average American is overly trusting and mentally lazy, and has been brainwashed into believing with their heart of hearts that no matter what happens either God or Government will save them, never realizing that God and Government are the perfect means to rob them blind.

Despite the pseudo-religious faith invested by so many in the various styles and flavors of economic-"isms," the fact is, humans are always the monkey wrench in the works of every economic system. The trick in minimizing this is to require transparency and to set up rules and regulations with enforcement mechanisms and personnel sufficient to prevent the worst of human tendencies toward greed to be freely expressed (all of which had been recently "de-regulated" out of existence in the US).

That and of course the system must be set up so that its purpose is to meet the needs of the society by effectively meeting the needs of the vast majority of citizens: providing useful incentives for those who might be inclined toward doing no productive work, whether rich or poor, to accomplish things that are worthwhile for themselves and for the society as a whole, while at the same time providing resources for those who are unable to work - medical and psychological help for those whose or mental health issues and dysfunctions make them unable to work or useless as workers - and basic food, clothing, shelter and health care for those who, for whatever reason will never be able to work (or work again).

You'll notice that maximum short-term profit, in other words, running the economy as one big get rich quick scheme, isn't anywhere in that picture. Seeing profit and the personal accumulation of resources as the only useful purpose of economic activity is what got us into this mess (the same as the Communist party in the old U.S.S.R.). The only thing that will get us out of this mess is taking a broader societally-based rather than strictly personally-based view to the purposes of economic activity and yes, that will take us a bit toward one of those other "isms."

But if you look objectively at the world around us, this approach is what works, no matter what form of "ism" your personal economic guru/messiah may have espoused. For those of us who believe the Gospels, it also would align our society more closely with the one some of us take to have been the actual Messiah.

This is not about capitalism vs. socialism.

This is about "free and unfettered" markets vs. regulated markets.

Two things crack me up:

1. The "but this wasn't really a free market; a REAL free market wouldn't have acted like this" defense. As we don't live in a textbook, this defense will always be available.

2. Lecture 3 (+/- 1) in microeconomics explains how external costs cause market inefficiencies/failure; later lectures cover the role of information, and how lack of good information, information asymmetry, etc. leads to market failure. Yet the "free and unfettered" crowd ignores this.

Want free and unfettered? Somalia has a completely unregulated market! Caveat emptor!

I think of the economic systems that have come about, capitalism is still the best way to allocate resources. You can not centrally plan an economy from the top down.

Very true. What you're not realizing is that capitalism is a sword, and that swords have two edges.

Capitalism can make people rich. But it can also make people poor. Capitalism is especially good at making small numbers of people obscenely rich - at the cost of making huge numbers of people desperately poor.

Theories of capitalism have nothing to say about how the wealth resulting from capitalism should be divided. That's generally left up to the capitalists. They prefer it that way.

Socialists have something different to say about that, and they know things about huge numbers of desperately poor people that capitalists can only dread. That involves pikes, and not swords, and the propensity of the desperately poor to use them to display the heads of the rich.

Ultimately the only stable system is to somehow balance an adequate generation of wealth through capitalism with an adequate distribution of that wealth through socialism. This is not necessarily to make the rich less rich, but is necessarily to make the poor less poor. That way both the capitalist and the socialist can have some security, with a system balanced on the edge of a sword.

You can expect both the capitalist and the socialist to want to unbalance such a system in their favor. That when the sword cuts.