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Originally Posted by kendo65
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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.
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Actually, I'm not (as you put it) "anti-state pro-free market"... you see, too much free-market (as in totally unregulated) is just as bad as too much intervention (as in Government control). Both end up with the masses standing in ruin, asking; "WTF happened?"
The way forward lay somewhere between the two. There needs to be a certain amount of free play and there also needs to be a certain amount of control. Australia set up a very effective regulator "APRA"... you'll have noticed our system did not go under (well not yet, but the socialists in power atm are endeavouring to rectify that). Most of all, there needs to be a high level of accountability. You can't privatise the profits and socialise the losses, neither (as the world has discovered) can socialism survive without capitailism.
The Clinton administration basically made it law (Community Reinvestment Act) that banks could not refuse homeloans to anyone in the their area. ie They made it so banks had no choice but to give loans to people who could not afford them.