Of course, when the treasury collapse comes, it will be because of free markets, and there'll be yet another increase in Government power.

It just reminds me of that little 1-2 you had with Mr. Khan about Obamacare, where he said the aim of it was to fail, to encourage even more Government involvement. You can bet your bottom dollar that was the intention of some of the people who voted for it. Also, have a chat with your neighbourhood friendly socialist, those guys are plotters! They literally plan everything out like this.

There was a book published in out of the Soviet Satellites called "and not a shot was fired", and that was talking about how to institute communism in the Western world without a war. The main steps included Government take over of major industries (financial sector, healthcare, vehicles, anyone?), and destruction of Western civil society - the family unit, religion, local communities.... and what have the results of many Government programs been? Destruction of those things.

Whether through incompetance, or design... Western Governments are following the advice of that book. Down to the letter.

Of course. Every government-caused tragedy has a new government solution, and the populace will always flock to the government in times of crisis. Look at how Bush's approval rating shot through the roof after his administration failed to prevent a terrorist attack. It's no conspiracy. It's far worse than that. It's the human condition.

But it would be odd, if that decision were so emotionally loaded for him, that he would then star in a film basically ridiculing his decision to move to Baseball (Space Jam).

Mostly the liberalizing economy has been responsible for the destruction of those things. Easier mobility of labor means the death of close-knit neighborhoods as people jump from town to town, state to state, country to country, following a career. Similar with the destruction of family beyond a simple unit of cohabitation (the nuclear family), like how my extended family has collapsed as people have grown up and moved away for jobs or to find nice retirement homes.

The decline of religion is a simple figment of progress, and has arguably aided the capitalist cause, because in the absence of spirtuality, money is the easiest thing to believe in.

I don't think that they deliberately set up Obamacare to fail, but what i do believe is that the passage of Obamacare has forced us into a position where we can't go back to how things used to be. Essentially, once you stop insurance companies from being able to discriminate against women or pre-existing conditions, once you force insurance companies to keep children on family plans up through age 26, who amongst the people would disapprove of that? The only thing people seem to hate about Obamacare, really, is the "cuts to Medicare" (which is really about streamlining and cost-saving) and the individual mandate, which is necessary to keep the first thing (non-discrimination) without having costs go through the roof.

Essentially, we're stuck with non-discrimination, because if word gets around that "repealing the affordable care act will mean these people with diabetes or those women who have had cesarian sections will lose their insurance," then the people are going to advocate that non-discrimination remains. But to keep non-discrimination, you NEED to have some sort of government intervention.

Thus we can only move forward here, and once people figure out how good non-discrimination is, there'll be no way to repeal the ACA.

Do keep in mind that people do eventually throw failures out of office. And, in extreme cases, they may even kill them. Powermongers want to be within the halls of power. They may very well be all for a more powerful government, but for them having a more powerful government of which they're not a part is like a member of the faithful being cut off from God. When they don't ably wield their current power, it isn't because they're banking on leveraging their failure into even more power for themselves in the future. It's out of incompetence or apathy, not cunning.

What ends up happening (and what we can sort of see going on in Europe, with their faster-moving electoral cycles) is that people move back and forth between the two mainstream parties, creating a revolving door when it's clear that neither the Socialists nor the Conservatives are quite able to deal with things. The Tories came in after the GFC, and now there is low confidence amongst the Tories that they'll be re-elected, with no reflection on the fact that Labour wasn't able to deal with the crisis when it happened. Greece moved from New Democracy to PASOK, and now sees the two of them together running the country in a coalition.

Unless there's a revolution, no group is ever so horribly discredited as to be thrown out in a way that will stick.

No party is, sadly, but individuals can and do end up out of office (albeit not often enough) or, what is probably just as bad for these power-worshipping shitheads, toiling in obscurity for years as a member of the powerless opposition. Some may be dyed in the wool partisans, but I don't for a second believe that such egocentric people as politicians love their party more than themselves. If your party is in power but you have been personally bitchslapped out of power, that is a cold fucking comfort indeed.

From people working together to "game" the system to get their friend hired to criminals working together to break the law, we're surrounded by conspiracies on a daily basis; but large scale conspiracies are unlikely to be true.

With each additional person you add to a conspiracy the likelihood of your conspiracy being discovered increase dramatically, and conspiracies involving more than a couple dozen people become nearly impossible to hide. Once you have a conspiracy that is large enough the challenge becomes to protect the conspiracy because information is bound to be released and this will be used to try to shut the conspiracy down.

Conspiracy theories that involve thousands of participants are strictly the domain of fiction ...

Unless those people don't really know the full picture.  Take for instance the building of the tank during WW1.  It was so secretive that most people that helped build it didn't really have a clue what the final product was going to be.