Originally Posted by kendo65 View Post
...
If you described Ireland (and specifically the Fianna Fail government and their policies) as socialist most people would find it hard to stop laughing. The Irish screwup was caused by the banks having to be bailed out and rescued by the (boo hiss! BAD!!!) government/state after fueling a housing boom that subsequently crashed.
Similar situation in Spain afaik.
------------------------------------------------
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf_Rider
|
So you're blaming too little and ineffective regulation for the problems in Ireland (and presumably elsewhere too). Probably a good point and one I wouldn't disagree with but a strange one to hear coming from the anti-state pro-free market side. So do you think then that governments/states should get more involved in regulating and limiting the market to ensure we don't have a repetition of the crash(es)?
Virtually no-one was in favour of any such measures before everything went belly up. In fact the major voices in the last 30 years had been proclaiming that 'the market knows best' and would self regulate. All that government had to do was get out of the way. That's pretty much what happened - the experiment was run starting with the deregulation of the Thatcher/Reagan era.
The results came through in 2008. Pretty definitively too.
Though the right can't face that fact, which they (accurately) judge is too threatening to their world-view, because to fully absorb the lessons of the crash would mean advocating more regulation and a stronger role for government.
As for the Clinton link, a rabidly biased right-wing hatchet job of a site repeatedly throwing the 'socialist' label actually says much more about their own lack of perspective than it does about Clinton or the Democrats.
But I have now realised that most of you are using the term 'socialist' in the Fox News sense of the term - i.e. worse than 'liberal', but (probably) not quite as bad as serial-killer, rather than any accurate dictionary definition of the term.