To regulate, or not to regulate: That is the question.

I think the free market can regulate itself. When the public doesn't like a product anymore or ever, the public votes with their wallets. It is a disgrace the Ponzi schemes even exist and I sympathize with the people who invested much of their savings to only find out recently that they no longer have a savings. Hopefully more people will be careful in the future to invest in a company which promises high rates of return.

It was government regs that created the problem. They were required to equal opp lend. So welfare and other entitlement funds were counted as income. This is just one part of it, but just proves that it is time for Government to butt out.

We need some regulation and we need it bad. For seventy years the regulations of the 1935 banking act clause (Glass Steagall Act) that separated investment, retail and commercial banking and set up the FDIC to insure ONLY retail banking, kept us from a financial meltdown. The first dismantlement (under Reagan) brought the Keating S&L mess and cost something like 500 billion. The final gutting of Glass Steagall(under Clinton)brought our current trillion dollar mess. The investment banking industry spent 300 million dollars lobbying for years to get rid of Glass Steagall. They finally got what they wanted and we got the worst financial crises since 1929. It's time to put those regulations back. They worked and we need them. Hopefully thepresident has been listening to Paul Volker who has been one of his advisors and who went on record under Reagan as opposing the removal of parts of Glass Steagall. The chief argument against Glass Steagall was that it was archaic and impeded growth in a free market place. While we were getting rid of these regulations, China was setting up their modern banking system. They incorporated the very regulations we discarded and the result was the fastest growing economy on earth.

We pay the members of government to police and enforce the laws of the land. They are not earning their money. We must make some drastic changes in our government where the average voter controls them. We just let them go and do whatever they want to and you can see the results of this all around us right now. The government must fear the actions of the people or it simply will not work in the best interest of the people. The American voters need the ability to vote people out of office in very short order. The only thing the politicians fear is loosing their job. The people need to ability to strip them of their job if they don't perform according to the desires of the people that pay them. In short the voters must control what the government does and how they do it. This last bail out would not have been passed if the people had their way. These people are employed by the American taxpayers and the taxpayers need the ability to fire them if they don't do their job right. Art