Sarah Palin seems to be the candidate in charge of the 20 year old campaign slogans. She goes on and on about fixing all of America’s woes by “getting government off your back and out of the way.”
Except for taxes in general – which is ALWAYS a hot topic – wasn’t this anti-government call to arms put to bed after the Reagan, Bush1 and Gingrich years? And can it really ring true today after 8 years of aggressive Republican priority-setting by GWB?
Do people still grumble about this like they used to, saying that they would be the next Bill Gates if only they did not have to fill out that damn 4-page government form to open up their Beanie Baby Emporium?
I don’t think I’ve heard ANY of the present-day candidates, except Palin, make an issue of this. (Maybe we can expect a speech from her on Free Silver soon!)
So, to use an all-too-easy Alaska reference, is she working a rich untapped vein of anti-government sentiment that will yeild a motherload of pro-McCain-Palin votes in November. Or is she toiling in a mine that has long been tapped-out?
The stock market mess will put her ignorance to bed. The lack of regulation led to an economic mess. How ugly does it have to be to get her hooted off the stage.?
One of the roles of the government is to keep the powerful from looting the system. We passed anti monopoly legislation over a century ago. We have to keep watch. The people are too weak. It requires an active and strong government. It requires careful regulation.
Seriously, I get the feeling that without the heavy government intervention in the market we’re seeing now, I feel that we’d be experiencing an absolute meltdown. It’s not entirely clear that this won’t happen anyway, but what do you think would have happened had Bush decided to let Fannie and Freddie die? I doubt it would have been pretty.
Bush, for however much he can be credited with the handling of the crisis so far (no idea, I feel like it’s Paulson’s doing mainly). You gotta hand it to him for at least not having another Brownie in the post I suppose. If we manage to not go into a total meltdown, I’d say I have to give Bush credit where it’s due.
But these assholes getting getting a reach around from the invisible hand need to listen to the big boys with the big brains. Notice that not a lot of people responsible for a great deal of money advocate getting rid of government to the extent a lot of Libertarians do. I think that’s quite telling.
Nitpick, it’s not actually a “stock market mess”. It’s a “real estate” and “credit” mess. People stopped paying off mortgages they never should have gotten in the first place. The banks all invested heavily in these complex instruments that consisted of the securitized mortgages and now they aren’t lending out any more money or they’re going out of business alltogether.
In this case, regulation of the mortgage approval process would probably have made a difference.
Yeah, it sucks to have to swallow that pill, but what other choice do we have? The point is we prevent this from happening in the future to the best of our abilities. When the housing market was defying all reasonable logic, we should have known then to figure out why. But nobody cared because we were all making money.
But we are in the process of determining why this is happening. Hopefully we’ll get some smart people in charge to overhaul the system to prevent his from happening in the future.
Honestly I feel that transparency is the best medicine for any market, and obfuscation of information leads to inequalities which eventually lead to corrections. Let’s face it people, with a completely transparent market it’s a lot more difficult to make gobs and gobs of money. When anyone can see what everything is worth it’s hard to argue with it. Maybe not so good for the big bankers on Wall St. but who cares? The market isn’t for them, it’s supposed to facilitate business, not be the business.
And as much as I wish I could take credit for the invisible hand quote, it’s not mine It was from some doper during amnesia weekend. If it’s yours I apologize. Forgot who it was…
Let shoddy businesses fail. It happens all the time. It is perilously distortive to socialize risk and privatize profit. People did discuss it. Nothing was done. I don’t know why. Probably the reasons are irritatingly complex.
It is not difficult to see how to prevent this in the future. The problem is that the players involved have an inordinate amount of political power to manipulate economic conditions. Bankruptcy law is a clear case of the problem.
Creditors face too many people declaring bankruptcy for their comfort. Do they a) tighten credit, being a responsible business; or b) lobby to make it harder for people to declare bankruptcy to continue predatory lending practices with usurious rates? If you said (a), I would love you to run all credit card companies. They chose (b). Not only did they choose (b), but the entire justification for such high interest rates is precisely because they expect not everyone to pay back their debt. The logical conclusion would be that even if they chose (b), they would then lower interest rates. But that didn’t happen either…
In any case, as for the OP, it’s only been a good sound byte and nothing more. When the government intervenes and alters something like bankruptcy law, all the goodly conservatives jump in and say it is about time the government forces people to be responsible. If you search threads, you can find just those comments from dopers along those lines on just that topic. Somehow that’s not the government getting out of the way. It seems to me it is getting in the way, but then, I’m not a creditor.
I may be off base, but I’ve gotten the impression that many Alaskans, including those of the hunting, snowmobiling, offroading, outdoorsy strain from which Palin comes, are politically conservative, but with a strong libertarian bent. Personal use and possession of marijuana was for all intents and purposes legal for a few years.
But Palin seems to be very much the other kind of conservative. I can’t fathom why she is so popular up there.
I always shake my head and feel like weeping with frustration at these kind of threads. Massive government intervention and over regulation is the cause of the problem, more often then not. It’s like watching a group of coprophiliacs decide that what they really need to cure their addiction is a shit sandwich. I had a friend who died from lung cancer but never quit smoking. Watching him inhale smoke into ravaged lungs from a cigarette held between shaking fingers while imploring me to “keep an eye out” for the doctors who were treating him cause they would put out the cigarette engendered the same feeling in me. As then, I have no idea what to do about it. A government that would truly get off our backs and out of our way? Sounds like heaven to me.
I know that there are people who still want this - many of them vote Republican because they only hear the words spoken and don’t notice the actual acts of their party.
I imagine most of the rest of them are Independent or Libertarian.
The government and its attendant parasites and private tentacles should be vastly reduced in power. Any candidate telling you this is not being sincere – after all, does she seriously recommend dramatically reducing the size of the military or the power of the POTUS?
Market drops 400 plus points and it’s not a market mess.? The simple fact is if they kept regulation ,those who tried to get a mortgage they could not afford, could not. The mortgage originators were paid to produce mortgages. They were packaged and sold off. They had no exposure. You think that is a good idea ? They got rich . In America that is enough.
You win the thread.
It was from some doper during amnesia weekend. If it’s yours I apologize. Forgot who it was…