And if it wasn’t for Donahue’s godawful show, there’d be no Oprah Winfrey or Jerry Springer shows today and America’s collective IQ would be a good 30 points higher. He only got where he is because he was married to That Girl.

Furthermore, why does the left assume that the poor would have nowhere to turn under a capitalistic system? Would there not still be private charities run by those who chose to give their time? Would churches and synagogues not continue to preach of the virtue of charity or tzedakah (which government wealth redistribution is not)?

And as for Phil’s utterly inane comment about “the maldistribution of wealth”? How would wealth be better used when sucked in a government black hole through excessive taxation? And how much did his show earn him?

Exactly as I said. ‘Not free enough.’

Said with some degree of derision, on your part. Are you then suggesting that people shouldn’t be more free – from government and from each other? That greater individual, economic freedom is to be avoided? Perhaps, I don’t know, that we need government to get along? Or to make our lives worth living?

Think before you answer. Whichever way you answer, it will reveal a lot about you.

And we’ll see who’s basing their arguments of facts and who on faith, though in your case, I’d say it was not faith, but animosity to freedom, er, capitalism. Oh, but wait, they’re pretty much the same thing.

So, folks, we have NOT been living under capitalism all this time. More on the topic of interest rates: Moderate-to-high interest rates are a good thing. They reward savers. They keep inflation in check. They keep debt in check (household and government). Most of all, they force the business community to invest rationally – halting the endless cycle of bubbles.

Exactly as I said. ‘Not free enough.’ It never will be. You’ll always have some bullshit about interest rates to complain about.

Just like a religion.

He didn’t foresee that the dollar would go up (as it has) in the initial stages of our nation’s crisis. But he got almost everything else right. And the dollar rally must and will pass.

after 30 years of the government heeding his advice and favoring free markets, the United States economy is collapsing.

That is simply false. The United States is today, and for the last 10-80 years has been anything but, a free-market economy.

Take the bailouts, for example. Bailouts are socialism (or perhaps fascism), not capitalism. And they were happening after 9-11; they’ve only experienced an uptick recently. Capitalism, or free-market economics, is letting the incompetent fail so that their assets can be taken over by the competent and re-deployed in ways that you and I can’t imagine. Who are the competent? The ones who can make a buck on their own, without bailouts.

Or take the Federal Reserve. They’ve been holding interest rates artificially low to “stimulate” the economy, and progressively destroying the value of the dollar in the process, for at least 20 years. Fed efforts to inflate the economy took an uptick with Greenspan’s response to the 1987 stock market hiccup, got worse in the late ’90s which created the dot-com bubble, got worse again after 9-11 creating what later became the real estate bubble, and is being made even worse today by Obama and Bernanke – creating God knows what is to come. Having a central bank dictate interest rates is not capitalism. It is tantamount to Soviet-style planning of the financial markets.

So, folks, we have NOT been living under capitalism all this time. More on the topic of interest rates: Moderate-to-high interest rates are a good thing. They reward savers. They keep inflation in check. They keep debt in check (household and government). Most of all, they force the business community to invest rationally – halting the endless cycle of bubbles.

If and when America is finally sick of Big Government, and ready to RETURN to the free-market policies it has long since abandoned, America will do these things:
- Let interest rates rise. Accept the resulting painful – and necessary – recession.
- Cut taxes. (Bush at least got that part right.)
- Cut government spending drastically. (Bush didn’t get that right, sadly.)
- Cut government regulation drastically.

not giving in to the assumptions of our intellectual adversaries

Hoo-yah!

Of course, nobody ever accused Phil Donahue of being an intellectual giant – except for those libtards who were dumber than he was.

Regards,
Peter H.

It’s fundamentalism. You will respond to anything I say on this point by insisting that the markets are not free enough. There will always be 30 year old government programs like the CRA to blame. There will always be more taxes to cut. The over-the-top anti-government rhetoric espoused by the Republican Party is effectively anarchy – except for the wars, of course. Gotta keep a skeleton crew around to start wars, but hell, even that’s getting privatized these days.

oh, and, before you rant on about Friedman’s alleged fundamentalism, have you actually read his stuff?

By the way, 30 years after this was recorded, and after 30 years of the government heeding his advice and favoring free markets, the United States economy is collapsing.