And it was better this time, because I didn’t think McCain was going to win, and I didn’t even think it was close enough for him/them to manage to cheat.

I worried about it some, but not the way I did last time.

I could quibble about the first part of the problem. as you describe it. There’s some evidence that the dodgy mortgage lending was not dominated by the people, disadvantaged by race, etc., which the law usually blamed was mean’t to help.

The second part of your problem is the biggie. It’s the climax of a long-running pattern of behaviour in the financial markets. There have been minor crises arising from derivatives markets, and badly-judged risks, for more than twenty years, since the days of Thatcher and Reagan.

It may be coincidence, but this has all coincided with a steady reduction of regulation, and a vast increase on the speed with which money flows through the markets. And we’re being told that in the latest mess, the banks don’t even know who owns what, and the Ratings Agencies have been handing out multiple-A ratings so profligately that they are about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve seen plenty of stupid, divorced-from-reality, government regulation–regulations aren’t an automatic salvation. But, looking at the lunacy in The City and on Wall Street, and all the other places where bankers congregate, somebody needs to do the moneychangers-in-the-temple routine, and it’s a choice between government regulation and bloody revolution.

I’m told that rope futures are tightening.

I’ve done 15400 words

Lots of dead Nazis.

The hero hanging from a carriage door on an express train from Harwich.

More dead Nazis.

A mad wife.

It scares me how little fact-checking I’m having to do.

Well, what Scrit said, for the most part.

“FDR, being a democrat and a socialist, can’t possibly have done anything good for the economy and it had to have been entirely due to luck.”

You might mean what I mean, but you’re not saying it the way I’m saying it. The argument isn’t that he “can’t possibly” have done good things, it’s that socialistic policies aren’t good for an economy. He did things — no hypothetical “can’t possibly have done” here — and those things helped certain individual situations but reduced the overall economy’s natural ability to outgrow a depression. Or so the argument goes.

And I wouldn’t call a World War “luck”. When you’re trying to take a historical perspective, then yes, you attribute certain effects to certain causes, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that FDR got lucky because of the war.

So when we remove the emotional language, we see a true-or-false question: “Did the New Deal help the American economy?” I’ve heard the arguments that say “no”, and they’re fairly compelling. Which leads to your last point…

With that in mind, and remembering that the same people who say the New Deal was a horrible idea are the ones who insisted on the deregulation and complete removal of oversight that’s caused the current economic crisis, you may want to re-evaluate the credibility of either side.

As I understand it, we’re having a crisis for (at least) two reasons: 1) The mortgage industry picked up a lot of higher-risk mortgages after they were incented to by the government, and 2) financial institutions started using instruments based on those mortgages without fully understanding the risks involved. Everything else follows from that.

If that’s the case, then there are alternate scenarios in which changes in government intervention could have prevented this crisis. First, if we had eliminated government intervention by eliminating cause 1, and second, if the government had understood the credit-backed financial instruments better than the investors had. Unless you have a strong feeling that scenario 2 would have played out, which I don’t, it makes sense to wish that we had been smart enough not to have so much government interference in the first place.

Some people have argued that the high-risk loans outperformed the low-risk loans, and I confess that I haven’t read the 80+ page document that proves their case. It does turn the terms “high-risk” and “low-risk” on their heads, however.

Go ahead. I’m willing to be educated, and I know you want to say it. What am I missing?

I’m not arguing that FDR’s New Deal was all bad, but that without examining it closely, it’s similar to saying you want to be just like so-and-so celebrity because they’re popular. And short of being an economist capable of making a coherent argument about cause and effect, I doubt you can convince me that you know any better than me in this.

For the record: I’m a 1st gen Canadian who grew up with a behind-the-scenes history of Polish communism, as my father was in the state-run media and got to see much of what was going on before it ever hit the editing room floor and was turned into acceptable propaganda. Anything that smacks of international communism, and yes, that includes modern Western Socialism, which was shaped early on by the NKVD and other Soviet intelligence operations, is suspect to me.

With that in mind, and remembering that the same people who say the New Deal was a horrible idea are the ones who insisted on the deregulation and complete removal of oversight that’s caused the current economic crisis, you may want to re-evaluate the credibility of either side.

You will, of course, say that they’re wrong. :)

Personally, I don’t know; I see good arguments and I wonder. At any rate, I don’t think that the people who disparage the New Deal are idiots, even if it turns out that they’re misguided.

If nothing else, an Obama win may be interesting if it shows us (for a second time) the effects of quasi-socialist government on a mostly capitalist country that’s in a recession.