For all my fellow gamers out there, can you imagine a video game under the "free market", no rules principle? You go to a store and pay whatever the store feels like charging you. After all, we can't have regulation specifying how much you can charge on a product. You get the game home, pop it in your Nintendo, and you get a blank blue screen. Because program code is merely a set of rules, regulations and parameters determining how the software is to function. I.e. when pixel (A) is in situation (B) and player (P) pushes the C button, (X) happens. And if done successfully, P is awarded (Y) points. But as the free market teaches, rules are bad. So in order to make a good and "realistic" game, the software development corporation decided "to heck with rules".

The moral: Regulations are a REQUIREMENT if you expect ANYTHING to function with the slightest modicum of order. From the regulations of business to the very rules of language (subject/ verb agreement, verb conjugation, etc.) that allow businessmen to communicate their hate of rules.

@B Roll -

Do you REALLY want Thom's show to be the Anti-FOX?

Like Bob's Country Bunker in the Blues Brothers flick (which presented both kinds of music ... Country AND Western) ,FOX snooze, as we all know, presents both sides of every arguement - the right and the ultra-right. Do you want Thom to present only the left and the ultra-left? Has the progressive movement moved into the to the same kind of bunkers that the neocons have been living in since the Reagan-Gingrich days, where the only points of view that they even want to hear about are those to which they already subscribe? Where the phrase "Fair and Balanced" is understood to be nothing but lip service - and is greatly appreciated as such?

I don't THINK that I live there yet ... and I hope I never do. Thom brings people with whom he disagrees onto his show, and they debate the issues. In doing so, he demonstrates for us strategies we can use in discussing those same issues with people who don't agree with us (e. g., my in-laws). I think the show would be boring if Thom's only guests were lefties like us.

That said, I don't think we need to hear from Dan Gainor and Carrie Lukas EVERY week, either. :)

Thom I like that fact that you often quote the Financial Times and I wanted to remind you and your readers that if you have not done so yet - I highly recommend Eliot Spitzer's article in the latest New Republic in my opinion, it is exactly what ails our financial system Dennis

Reagan, only elected because of the nefarious"'October Surprise", was a complete disaster for main street. as Thom has pointed out we were doing fine with the top tax rate at 70% or more, the B actor slashed that all the way down to 28%. Of course he also went nuts deregulating things.

Fewer and fewer companies control way too much, and it has strangled local and regional businesses. There were two enormous local/regional institutions in central Ohio, where I live, that had seemingly been there forever and we assumed that wouldn't change, gone since Reagan.

But the huge cuts in tax rates combined with insane wars that are enormously profitable to the Halliburtons of the world but an albatross around our necks, have made life tough for the rest of us and things are likely to get far worse before they get better.

Another thing that happened under Reagan at the same time was it was made legal for the buyer of a company to appropriate pension funds of the workers and use that money to bolster their position. Criminal

WHAT WE'VE BEEN SAYING...

From today's NYTimes:

"Emphasis on Growth Is Called Misguided"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/business/economy/23gdp.html?_r=1&adxnn...

By PETER S. GOODMAN
Published: September 22, 2009

Among the possible casualties of the Great Recession are the gauges that economists have traditionally relied upon to assess societal well-being. So many jobs have disappeared so quickly and so much life savings has been surrendered that some argue the economic indicators themselves have been exposed as inadequate.

In a provocative new study, a pair of Nobel prize-winning economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, urge the adoption of new assessment tools that incorporate a broader concern for human welfare than just economic growth. By their reckoning, much of the contemporary economic disaster owes to the misbegotten assumption that policy makers simply had to focus on nurturing growth, trusting that this would maximize prosperity for all.

“What you measure affects what you do,” Mr. Stiglitz said Tuesday as he discussed the study before a gathering of journalists in New York. “If you don’t measure the right thing, you don’t do the right thing.”

According to the report, much of the world has long been ruled by an unhealthy fixation on swelling the gross domestic product, or the quantity of goods and services the economy produces. With a singular obsession on making G.D.P. bigger, many societies — not least, the United States — failed to factor in the social costs of joblessness and the public health impacts of environmental degradation. They allowed banks to borrow and bet unfathomable amounts of money, juicing the present by mortgaging the future, thus laying the ground for the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

The report is more critique than prescription. It elucidates in general terms why leaning exclusively on growth as an economic philosophy may yield unhappiness, and it suggests that the incomes of typical people should be weighed more heavily than the gross production of whole societies. But it sidesteps the thorny details of slapping a cost on a ton of pollution or a waylaid career, leaving a great mass of policy choices for others to resolve.

Some Americans may reflexively reject the report and its recommendations, given its provenance: it was ordered up last year by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, whose dissatisfaction with the available tools of economic assessment prompted him to create the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. Tuesday’s briefing was held in an ornate room at the French consulate. The official French statistics agency is already working to adopt the report’s recommendations. Mr. Sarkozy plans to bring it with him to the G-20 summit meeting in Pittsburgh this week, where the leaders of major countries will discuss a range of policy issues.

But whatever one’s views on the merits of European economy policy, and wherever one sits on the ideological spectrum, these appear fitting days to re-examine how economists measure vital signs — particularly in the United States.

By most assessments, the American economy is now growing again, perhaps even vigorously. Many experts expect a 3 percent annualized rate of expansion from July through September. As a technical matter, the recession appears to be over. Yet the unemployment rate sits at 9.7 percent and will probably climb higher and remain elevated for many months. In millions of households still grappling with joblessness and the tyranny of bills, signs of health served up by the traditional economic indicators seem disconnected from daily life.

This was precisely the sort of contradiction Mr. Sarkozy sought to unravel when he created the commission, tasking it with pursuing alternate ways of measuring economic health.

To head the panel, he picked Mr. Stiglitz, a former World Bank chief economist whose best-selling books amount to an indictment of the Washington-led model of global economic integration. Mr. Sarkozy also selected Mr. Sen, a Harvard economist and an authority on poverty.

The resulting report amounts to a treatise on the inadequacy of G.D.P. growth as an indication of overall economic health. It cites the example of increased driving, which weighs in as a positive within the framework of economic growth, as it requires greater production of gasoline and cars, yet fails to account for the hours of leisure and work time squandered in traffic jams, and the environmental costs of pollutants unleashed on the atmosphere.

During the real estate bubble that preceded the financial crisis, the focus on economic growth helped encourage overbuilding and investment in real estate. Mr. Stiglitz argues that the single-minded focus on growth gave American policy makers a false sense of assurance that their policies were virtuous, as they allowed financial institutions to direct virtually unlimited sums of money into real estate and as consumer debt levels built with unrestrained momentum.

Credit enabled spending, and spending translated into faster growth — an outcome that was intrinsically good, and never mind how long it might last or the convulsions that would accompany the end of easy money.

A growth-oriented policy encouraged homeowners to borrow as if money need never be repaid, and industry to produce products as if the real cost of pollution were zero, Mr. Stiglitz added.

“We looked to G.D.P. as a measure of how well we were doing, and that doesn’t tell us whether it’s sustainable,” he said at the briefing. “Your measure of output is grossly distorted by the failure of our accounting system. What began as a measure of market performance has increasingly become a measure of social performance, and that’s wrong.”

Instead of centering assessments on the goods and services an economy produces, policy makers would do better to focus on the material well-being of typical people by measuring income and consumption, along with the availability of health care and education, the report concludes.

Many of these prescriptions will no doubt resonate with policy makers and ordinary people.

Indeed, the difficulty comes in turning these general principles into new means of measurement. The report notes that its authors concur on the big picture, but diverge on the methodologies to be employed when it comes to factoring in the value of a better education and cleaner skies.

The old mode of measurement has taken a beating, and yet the new one, it seems, is still a work in progress.

Thom! You called Pittsburgh Philadelphia! That's an insult! We here in the City of Champions would like an on-air apology. Thanks. (Love your show, you're brilliant!)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/21/iran/index.html

Glenn Greenwald is one of my favorite writers.

David,
I was rude not to welcome you too. i appreciate your voice being added to the debate. One thing we can all assume is that visitors to this forum love their country a great deal. It's welfare is a preoccupation of all of us. Attacking ideas to test their metal is common and happily engaged. You will find the level of discourse fairly high I'll wager. Attacking in a personal way or questioning motives is a rarity from what I have experienced. Trolls are ignored and poorly reasoned arguments are dismantled with relish. Yours is a voice from the wilderness which will be appreciated if not always shared. I for one long for the time when people from both camps consider themselves more brother countrymen than political enemies. By the way, I once considered myself a Republican. We all can grow. just kidding.....

David,

It is good to hear from a Republican who is centrist. Your kind of voice is either seldom raised or all too often drowned out by the extremists who appear to be in charge of your camp. We all want to believe that our position represents a majority, but that aint necessarily so.
As to your assessments of "Government" being unreliable or bad, I'll agree that Congress is often craven and obnoxious, but, "government" is far more than just the legislative elected. There are hundreds of thousands of hard working Americans who get up every day and do their level best to perform their jobs in the publics' service. They do remarkably hard and important work extremely well. Your side first demonized them, a long time ago by derisively calling them bureaucrats. Then their think tanks expanded the cynical attacks by making government a buzz word. You conflate the failures of our many money poisoned politicians with ALL who draw a government check. Not true and Not fair. At least you recognize that money is a big factor. This is the area where we can come together. I fear that you are a rare kind of Republican though. Your party it seems is the party that worships the dollar and free market capitalism above all other values. Your most laudable Republican of all described government this way: "Of the people, by the people, and for the people. So, logically you either would quarrel with Lincoln or would quarrel with the people's democratic voice.

David

Welcome!

@David: Welcome! You have found a safe place here. Please feel free to discuss the points you feel relevant. Jingoism and knee-jerk ideology will get immediate criticism but if you are about actual discourse you are one of us.