Obama care

[DeistPaladin]

You sound just like the rest of the religious twits who get onto this site with no knowledge of what they're talking about but make claims all over the place without ever backing them up.

Just goes to show you, being an atheist doesn't mean you're rational. It just means you're not irrational about one specific issue.

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DP:

I don't disagree, but I'd go further.

Statist...
policies...
don't...
work!

and what's more they are immoral.

I don't disagree and I don't think you accused me of being one. I think life is a balance. As our government is based on the principle of three branches with one never being allowed to get too powerful, so to I think a strong and balanced economy is based on three branches: Management, unions and government regulation.

To simplify just a bit, business produces the wealth, unions, when they are needed, make sure the wealth is shared with all those who help produce it, and government mediates and keeps all parties honest.

I have a sober view of what can be expected from all groups. Sure corporations are soulless. They're machines. What do you expect? Business management (and I'm speaking as a business owner myself) will run a tight ship, control costs and maximize output. However, they will not take care of the environment, protect worker's rights or even care about the country they exist in. Unions and government regulation can also be destructive to the economy if they grow too powerful as well but that's not the problem we currently face. Right now, Republican policy has been to concentrate as much wealth and power at the top and in the hands of corporate management. If allowed to continue, this will turn America into a 3rd world country with the top 1% owning everything and the rest scrounging in squalor.

I ask you, if you think that it was deregulation to blame for the financial crisis, what type of deregulation was it? It certainly wasn't the scrapping of government subsidies and handouts. You moved closer to corportatism, the privatisation of profits and the socialisation of losses, it wasn't a free market.

It was the worst of both worlds, privatized profit and socialized risk. The government guarantees the solvency of banks and certain loaning industries and then when regulations are taken away, we can expect the owners to engage in high risk ventures. When the economy does well, they laugh all the way to their bank. When it does poorly and their risky ventures go belly up, they turn to the government, hat-in-hand.

In finance class, I learned how the market weighs out risk so that higher risks will yield higher expected returns (if they pan out as hoped) while "safe" investments (relatively speaking) yield lower returns. So, if you have a guarantee that you can't fail, which will you invest in? It's no wonder that we've had a series of financial crises since the push for "deregulation".

Fanny and Freddy were classic examples. They were "privatized" and yet still retained their government seal-of-approval with the promise of backing if they failed. They're examples why "privatization", as it is often promoted by Republicans, is really more like corporate welfare.

Either a government needs to be completely hands off (and if they fail, they fail) or they need to provide guarantees but at the cost of close scrutiny. Corporate welfare, often characterized by socialized risk, privatized profit, is the worst of both worlds.

You and I seem to be in agreement on that point.