3 ms·

Uh, if the banks had been allowed to fail the FDIC would have been wiped out. If GM and Chrysler had been allowed to fail the PBGC would have been wiped out.

Uh, if the banks had been allowed to fail the FDIC would have been wiped out. If GM and Chrysler had been allowed to fail the PBGC would have been wiped out. Fannie and Freddie were wiped out and would incidentally have failed due to investor flight in the early 2000s if they had submitted financials to investors like other firms (meanwhile the CEOs got very rich). BTW off the books entities are what everyone hated about Enron... our GSEs are the exact same scheme. Bernie Madoff's daughter was married to a SEC official and in spite of being reported to the SEC multiple times over the years his fund was not investigated. Only the biggest financial crisis since the great depression made his scheme unsustainable, at which point the fraud was obvious, and he was used as a scapegoat for the crisis itself... as if his fund caused it! Some of the items on your list are good services that are provided by government... but if you look at the government budget they make up (at best) a few percent.

MartinCron 17y ago
I was responding to a preposterous absolutist comment that government sucks at solving any problems. This preposterous absolutist comment was backed up with a small handful of examples solved poorly by government, so I put up a few counter-examples. You can counter some of my counters and we could go back and forth all day, but that doesn't help anyone. The fact that government can provide multiple valuable services for just a fraction of overall budget each isn't proof of anything. There's a very trendy and shallow mindset these days that government is absolutely terrible at absolutely everything. The truth is more nuanced than that.
- grandalf 17y ago
  That may be true, but just as the smallest scientific theory is usually the best one, the smallest government intervention is usually the best. This entails that a local program is usually going to be better than a state program, which is usually going to be better than a Federal program at addressing needs.

MartinCron 17y ago

I was responding to a preposterous absolutist comment that government sucks at solving any problems. This preposterous absolutist comment was backed up with a small handful of examples solved poorly by government, so I put up a few counter-examples. You can counter some of my counters and we could go back and forth all day, but that doesn't help anyone. The fact that government can provide multiple valuable services for just a fraction of overall budget each isn't proof of anything. There's a very trendy and shallow mindset these days that government is absolutely terrible at absolutely everything. The truth is more nuanced than that.

grandalf 17y ago
That may be true, but just as the smallest scientific theory is usually the best one, the smallest government intervention is usually the best. This entails that a local program is usually going to be better than a state program, which is usually going to be better than a Federal program at addressing needs.