Jacobtm
Sr. Member
Posts: 3,216
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« on: February 17, 2012, 07:19:16 PM » |
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« edited: February 17, 2012, 07:23:47 PM by Jacobtm »
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I was a pretty libertarian guy until the crash of '07/'08
I had a bunch of friends who were, I thought, on the same page as me. Guys who invested in the stock market and were all about free markets, small gov't, etc.
Then they started going on and on about how the bailouts were needed. How we had to give trillions upon trillions of dollars to the people who had just failed.
That's when I saw that the ''free market'' rhetoric was all B.S. These people who blab on about it aren't interested in liberty or the free market, they're just interested in lining their pockets. They're more than happy with robbing the taxpayer blind to do so.
Greed, aka the profit motive, is the engine that drives capitalism. It's also the engine that drives these same capitalists to seek corrupting influence over our government.
I still believe in the free market. No reason we shouldn't let private enterprise basically run the economy. But I see a much bigger need for government to break up ''too big to fail'' companies and STRONGLY enforce anti-corruption laws, insider trading laws, and all sorts of things like that. If you read the history of the financial crash, it is full of crimes for which no one has been punished.
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