Rob Roy
Well-Known Member
You're substantially oversimplifying if you think the repeal of Glass-Stegall was the cause of the financial crisis. AIG, Fannie Mac, Freddie Mae, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and dozens of other players weren't commercial banks, so the repeal of the law was irrelevant to them--it had no impact whatsoever on their ability to take the actions they did. The banks that were impacted weren't just securitizing mortgages and shoving them off their balance sheets. Washington Mutual and Wachovia were brought down by their subprime losses because they had huge mortgage portfolios; and Citigroup and Bank of America nearly went under for exactly the same reason (Bank of America had purchased Countrywide, responsible for 20% of the mortgage underwriting in the United States at the time).
How would Glass-Stegall have prevented the financial crisis? The investment bankers wouldn't have been impacted; same for AIG; same for the GSEs; and the banks would have been free to amass their huge mortgage portfolios as well.
For the record, I blame everyone. The financial crisis was the result of national greed: greedy bankers, greedy politicians, greedy Americans making bad decisions. Everyone was guilty.
A moderate recognizes that there is no universal political or economic philosophy that humans can agree to follow. The extremes, such as Marxism and libertarianism, reflect the preferences of relatively small groups, and that's why they are objectionable and impractical.
The political groups rewrite history to meet their own narrative needs. They intentionally misspeak in order to mislead people sympathetic with their ideologies. Politicians play party politics to obtain power because pandering to political extremes is a much easier route to office than creating political coalitions.
You're giving FDR the credit when you should be giving it to World War II. Likewise, the prosperity the United States experienced in the postwar period had a lot more to do with the destruction of most of the world's industrial capacity than it did with policy prescriptions: if all the competition has been destroyed there is no choice except to buy your goods.
Your description of libertarianism is somewhat misleading regarding policy. In a "libertarian world" socialism would be permitted, for those that want to be socialists, as long as socialists leave those people that don't want any part of socialism alone.. The allowance for preferences of the INDIVIDUAL to align or not align with ANY group differentiate libertarians.