Another Day, Another Buck Two-Fifty

What passes for smarts these days is the ability to look at the past with 20/20 vision. Apparently the economists and their analysts were unable to see the the dark clouds on the horizons that have turned into what the former Fed Chairman and golden boy Alan Greenspan termed as the coming...credit tsunami.

The warning signs were either ignored completely or pooh-poohed by those who were the "smartest guys' in the room and those who disagreed were dismissed as nervous nellies who had no faith in the markets ability to correct itself.

During the recent hearings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Greenspan admitted that the ideology guiding his policies were proved wrong by the reality on the ground.

This apparent inability to see past this ideology is one of the reasons the country finds it self in the condition that it is in. This belief that the market is some sort of entity that exists irrespective of greed and self interest is truly pie-in-the-sky at best, and delusional at worst.

One would think that history is the greatest teacher, however, the more we examine our present condition, the clearer it is that we ignore our lessons and continue traipsing trough the tulips expecting different results. The excesses of the mid eighteenth century gave rise to beginnings of the labor movement, and the excesses of the early twentieth century gave rise to much needed social safety nets.

The past thirty years have seen a deliberate attempt to unravel the labor movement and to undo the programs that have provided hope to many people. The current financial crisis is just the latest result of wishful thinking on the part of the 'smartest' guys in the room.

There you have it.