We are a nation of spectators. We watch TV, we watch ball games, we watch movies, we sit on park benches and people-watch. We sit in our lazy boy recliners and complain about everything, yet seldom do anything. That is not always a bad thing, but it can be a bad thing when we should intervene as citizens of this country. It's almost been fatal to our country when it is our government officials that do nothing.

Sure, we've complained when this administration has done something we don't like. The bigger problem, though, is when it hasn't done anything at all. Would you sit and watch a baby drown in the bathtub? Of course not. But that's what's happened the last 8 years. The sick part of it is that it's all part of the "small government" agenda proposed by Grover Norquist and his ilk. They haven't had to shrink government so they could actively drown it in the bathtub - they've sat by and watched it drown on its own.

Oversight has been non-existent. The theories of "self-regulation" and "the market will correct itself" via competition goes against common sense, and - as expected - have resulted in financial ruin and death. What person in their right mind would think that business can be trusted to do the right thing?

If we're supposed to be so trusting of self-regulation and market correction, why not just do away with the police forces? Sure initially some people might get killed, but then the "market" (the citizens) would simply correct itself (arm themselves) and everything would be fine (frontier justice). For gawds sake, even towns in the wild west had sheriffs.

We've seen what lack of regulation and oversight means in the new "wild west" of the banking industry... We have banks tying up risky debt in a pretty pink bow and calling it an asset (and then selling it to another bank). They then lend money on this "asset". This is like FAUX News creating "facts" out of thin air by:

1. Commentator says "I wonder if this is true"


2. Later another commentator says "There's been talk of..."


3. News reader says "Some say that..."


4. Another news reader says "We investigate the facts to see if this is what everyone has been saying. Watch for the results of our investigation" (which leaves the result in question for the viewer to decide)

This is a bad model for news and a worse model for banking. When you deposit your hard-earned money in the bank, you don't want to have to wonder if it's being used to buy bad debt as an "investment". But - according to the neo-cons - if your bank fails, that's just the market correcting itself, and competition from other banks will prompt you to start over at a different one...

Except - there really isn't that much competition. This is another fatal flaw in the neo-con economic premise that competition maintains an even playing field. I believe it was William A. Barnett who described economics in terms of chaos and raindrops. He said that businesses are like the drops of rain on the hood of a car. Initially, they are all separate. However, the drops begin to glump together to form bigger drops, with the big drops swallowing the smaller drops until you have one big drop.

This has proven to be the case in the banking industry, the auto industry, the media industry... the word "merger" is just another way to say "monopoly". What does the neo-con agenda say about preventing monopolies? It doesn't - it just says "hands off".

As a result of non-intervention, we have huge corporations that are "too big to fail", yet have done so in spectacular fashion. They've focused on profits over people and exhorbitant CEO pay over profits. With no competition, they've ignored the demands of the market, which then really caused problems when competition (usually from foreign shores) came back into the picture. They've focused more on marketing than on the products themselves. They've outsourced everything to the point that there aren't enough workers in America to buy the products they're selling.

As a result, we can choose from American-made crap, Chinese-made crap, or expensive well-made products from Europe or Japan. We've even outsourced food production, resulting in poison dog food and melamine in our milk. We have an FDA that cannot initiate a food recall (it must be done voluntarily by the food manufacturer itself).

Where is the market correction in all of this?

It finally happened on November 4th.

As the nation's electorate looked around at a country they barely recognized anymore and wondered what the hell happened, it began to dawn on them that maybe the current way of doing things was not working. The deregulated freemarket economy espoused by the neo-cons may have looked good on paper, but people realized that they really WANT government to ensure that they don't have to get screwed by business as part of a "correction". So they did what they could.... they voted.

The baby has been pulled from the tub. There's a new sheriff in town. The neo-cons have had years to prove their theories and their theories have proven to be unworkable in real life. Now we have a chance to show how well government-regulated capitalism can work.

There's hope for the baby yet.