Is the liberal idea of a free market, one that gives away free cheese?

[john]

Yes.

[Paul Jackson]

What is with you people and the free cheese today?

[★Ŕ♡MΛŔƐ★]

Oh Barry, you're so cute. I bet you think you're clever with your never-ending false stereotypes of this mythical group called "liberals." No one thinks the things you think they think.

[iris054]

No. We know there IS no free market. Nor should there be. What we need is a FAIR market because without that we have too many living in poverty.
As Elizabeth Warren said, the game IS rigged. Since Reaganomics the rich have seen their income go up over 270%. The destruction of labor unions has fueled an enormous pay gap between CEOs and workers. When Reagan came into power, CEOs made 25 times more than their average worker; today it’s 500 times more.

Thirty-two years of Reaganomics have resulted in the top 1% seeing their share of national income triple over the last three decades while the bottom 90% have seen their share drop by 20%. Years of lobbying and outright bribery have rigged the tax code against working Americans, forcing them to pay a higher tax rate than members of the corporate elite like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffet.

Not only that, but the higher taxes we pay don’t get reinvested to help the working class with things like better social services, education, or better infrastructure. That money is going straight to corporate treasuries in the form of bail outs to Wall Street, tax subsidies to the oil industry, and give-aways to the for-profit health cartels. For instance, the Wall Street bailout paid by you and me led to banksters getting paid more than $50 billion in bonuses just in 2009, while that same year we the taxpayers lost 25% of the value of our 401Ks. That same year the richest 400 people increased their wealth by $30 billion, giving them more wealth than the bottom 155 million Americans combined. That’s about half of America.

As DeGraw points out, had our taxpayer money been invested in job creation instead, 5 million Americans could have been put back to work earning $30,000/year each. Our unemployment rate would be about 4-5%. Instead, more than $14 trillion was quietly passed out to Wall Street and corporate America. Trillions more went to our for-profit military-industrial complex so they could profit from the never-ending “war on terror.” Not a single penny was re—invested in better education, better health care, better infrastructure, or job creation for working Americans.

Before Dubya Bush, we Americans spent 7% of our income on food and energy. Today, it’s 20%. Working Americans pay 8% of their income on health care, more than any other nation in the developed world, yet we get the worst results. The cost of housing for the middle class has gone up 34%.

Smart people will not endorse the kind of middle class destroying policies that useful idiot Republicans are pushing. Smart people are standing up and speaking out against this right now. They know that to reverse the damage that’s been done we need to roll back the Reagan tax cuts, and strengthen protections for labor unions. Taxpayer money needs to be re-invested in the community, and not given to trans=national corporations to build factories in Viet Nam and pay their CEOs billions. We’ve got it figured out.

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[slykitty62]

Nope. It is a free market that has regulation that protects the little people from the corporations tryanny.

[mommanuke]

No. That's cons. Like the one who emailed me complaining last week that Obama was trying to destroy the coal industry when the fact is that the free market is doing that due to lower demand and cheaper natural gas. I guess they think we should bankroll the coal industry until we can force people to use it again. Free Cheese for Corporations!

[Alex]

No, it's one where the consumers are on the same level as the producers and giant companies don't get unfair advantages. As you would know if you knew anything about basic economics, the free market doesn't work when you have an information asymmetry between firms and consumers, when the firms have the power to set prices in the market, or when there are high barriers to entry for new firms.

[SmartAZ]

If you mean politics, anything can be true if you keep saying it, and nothing is true if you can't be forced to admit it.

If you mean economics, half the people are trained in Keynesian bs and they follow the political advice above. The other half are not trained at all and are quite willing to let the government take over all their responsibilities even though the government has a lousy reputation in that subject. They don't ever want their responsibilities back for any reason.

This all keeps on until it is physically impossible to support the regime any longer. After the crash the people grieve for the glory they used to feel. People still mourn the loss of "the roaring 20s" almost a century ago, even though it directly caused the crash of 29 and the hardships thereafter.