[quote=SK in CV]
You know markmax, you’re very right on one part here. They certainly were the first to issue mortgage backed securities. From well before this most recent bubble/bust. And before the bubble/bust of the early 90’s. And before the bubble/bust of around 1980. And before the little bubble/bust of the mid-70’s. Ginnie Mae started issuing mortgage backed securities in 1968. Freddie Mac in 1971. They did it for more than 30 years before this most recent bubble/bust. But Wall Street? They just got involved after November of 1999. Took em a few years to get ramped up, but when they did, all hell broke loose.[/quote]

This is where the hardcore libertarian arguments start falling apart. Government actually can do a lot of things really well, so can private industry. It’s when they start getting together, when people start rewriting legislation to suit certain big interests, when people are moving back and forth between government jobs and private jobs, when the prez has these same corporate goons in nearly every office, that things seem to go really haywire. With the bushies it is the oil and defense crowd and with clinton/obama it seems to be these financial clowns.

Again, I don’t know for sure but it definitely seems like repealing Glass-Steagall was the trigger for the whole deal. And again, that was government regulation that had prevented this sort of thing for a long time. Government regulation can sometimes be a good thing.

I will still vote for Paul in the primary even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things. If he were somehow elected, he wouldn’t be able to turn the country into a libertarian wonderland overnight, there is still a congress and a judiciary he would have to deal with. At least he is getting people to think about the idea of liberty, that you can’t always expect someone to bail you out or take care of you.