I should have spoken clearer, I mean to say excessive highs and lows. We were unequivocally in an excessive high recently, which meant the government should have piled on the taxes to raise revenue and prevent growth from collapsing in on itself.
Otherwise I mostly agree, although you guys are overblowing how important that one bit of regulation was. The Fed had overextended credit across the board, not just to the housing market. Not to mention the financial sector itself was the one who created the snowball effect by rolling mortgages into nice little packages and reselling them. I don't understand how some of you have so much faith in the market being left to its own ends in one sentence and then in the next you say that the government forced the financial sector into a corner, pinned it down, and made it start repackaging and resaling mortgages wholesale.
This is essentially what happened. The government gave the financial sector a knife. The financial sector turned it into an iron maiden. What you are saying is like blaming a gun manufacturer for a school shooting. You are rearranging your causes and your effects.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
