Arianna Huffington: Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism

Arianna Huffington: Laissez-Faire Capitalism Should Be as Dead as Soviet Communism: "'There is no question we did not recognize the severity of the problems,' claimed Al Hubbard, Bush's former chief economic adviser. 'Had we, we would have attacked them.'
But the mistake wasn't in not recognizing the 'severity of the problems' -- the mistake was the ideology that led to the problems. Communism didn't fail because Soviet leaders didn't execute it well enough. Same with free market fundamentalism. In fact, Bush and his team did a bang-up job executing a defective theory. The problem wasn't just the bathwater; the baby itself is rotten to the core.
William Seidman, the longtime GOP economic advisor who oversaw the S&L bailout in 1991, cuts to the chase: 'This administration made decisions that allowed the free market to operate as a barroom brawl instead of a prize fight. To make the market work well, you have to have a lot of rules.'
Even Alan Greenspan, whose owl-eyed visage would adorn a Mount Rushmore of unregulated capitalists, has begun to see the light, telling a House committee in October that he 'made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.'"

When you have folks running the Federal Government that do not believe in Government, then this is what you get. Incompetence and crony capitalism rule the Republican Party and unfortunately the country.