"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:490e1dc5$1@news.povray.org...
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> against things like fraud, theft, violence, etc., wouldn't have done 
>> anything to **stop** the current financial crisis, because nothing the 
>> companies that caused it did falls into **any** of those categories.
>
> Except to the extent they are regulated banks and the government already 
> took over banking and money, yeah. I mean, given that you let the 
> government control printing of the money, confiscating gold, and 
> eliminating risk for banks, no, there's nothing they did that fall into 
> those categories. One of the things Ron Paul (as I understand it) 
> advocates is getting the government out of the business of trying to 
> regulate the economy in the first place.

It sounds nice in theory, especially when you've studied Adam Smith and 
believe in the "invisible hand", but history has shown us that an unmanaged 
economy can get, quite literally, stuck in a rut(1).  In such situations, 
massive economic intervention is the only way to achieve anything close to 
normal(2) productivity.

(1) OK, I've only taken one semester of economics, but it was enough to 
convince me that Keynes was right about the Great Depression.  The economy 
got to a point where 1/3 of the population was unemployed, and on its own it 
would have probably stayed that way for decades.

(2) It varies, but most economists call full production a 5% unemployment 
rate (or thereabouts).

...Chambers

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