Well, if you keep bumping up the government's power level to fight unwinnable wars against (mostly phantasmal) enemies, how long you'll remain a "free" society is very much in question.

That is plainly ludicrous.

A. Power always - always - brings with it personal privileges. This is an immutable fact of life.

B. There are far more reasons for doing things wrong than mere corruption. A sincere person imbused with power can be worse than anyone because, as C.S. Lewis said, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

C. Remove all potential for relatively harmless graft, and politics would probably even more likely to attract fucked up control freaks who just want to rule other people than it already is.

Haven't read the thread yet but I guess this came up already:

What happened back then can not be compared to this. The problem was not giving away credits to the poor but mixing those credits with AAA credits and selling this mixed bag on the international market as super safe AAA Credit package despite of all the duds hidden inside. 

If all parties included know the risks, its ok since everyone will operate on that premise.

I agree with this. My husband is totally ready to be Joe homeowner so we've started saving for a down-payment. We're thinking about buying a fixer upper since he could do a lot of the work. We have perfect credit though, but I still think it's hard to get a loan even if your credit is fine. My friend just got a loan for BoA and he kept having to go back to redo the paperwork like 4-5 times. They didn't make it easy for him.

We are going through a credit union we were apart of back in MD that is tied to the treasury. Bad side is, our cards are replaced more often because of the hacking. Good side is their rates are just simply unbeatable.

Rent is more expensive to own a house here and aside from property taxes, is very affordable. We never had any problems in an apartment up north, but here, there is more violence and cars being broken into, etc. Though our rent was just under $1000/mo for a one-bedroom not including utilities and such... it was the cheapest around too being inbetween Baltimore/DC.

Should be fun. I'm looking forward to it... but then dreading moving all my worldly crap again for like the nth time ._. We haven't heard back from the bank, we just started and it's been like 4 weeks now just because it's a buyer's market.

That only explains why the subprime mortgage crisis triggered a global financial meltdown, but giving people loans they can never afford to pay back is simply a bad idea and doing it again will still create a bubble which must eventually burst (housing market collapse, mass foreclosures, etc., all over again).

Eventually. But it could work out if the economy picks up in those areas. Risky, but its atleast an american risk. Its not a guaranteed failure just a calculated risk.