Getting Theirs

I agree with this, strongly:

Go ahead and wallow, Wall Street creeps, that’s capitalism and I’m with Churchill in saying “it’s the worst system in the world–except for all the others.” There’s no law against it and I’m not advocating confiscatory socialism. But don’t expect us to applaud your billion dollar bonuses and your swinelike consumption when people all over the world — a billion live on less than a dollar a day — are starving and dying.

And close to home people are losing their jobs, homes, and health insurance while you manipulate the financial system for your selfish enrichment and its ultimate self-destruction. No, there’s no law against it, but there is moral contempt. No we shouldn’t socialize or nationalize, but when your shamelessness brings misery to others and you display no evident self awareness of your destructive behavior, it’s great to have a president who will speak for all of us and call you out with the contempt you so richly — so to speak — deserve.

Said John Adams once:

Banks have done more injury to the religion, morality, tranquility, prosperity, and even wealth of the nation than they can have done or ever will do good.

He also said our constitution was for a moral people and that ruin would follow if we ever lost our way, as most democracies were known to do throughout history. But as Rosenbaum says, the tyranny of socialism is no solution, especially when self-serving politcal opportunists try to shove it down our throats under the guise of a crisis while ensuring us they will police themselves.