Oh you are mistaken there. Lack of government oversight is what made this mess. Loaning institutions being in bed with investment institutions and both of them throwing safe business practices to the wind caused this catastrophe. No one forced banks to stop checking peoples' credit rating and start cutting loans to anyone. No one forced investment institutions to make the resulting billions of dollars of bad paper, turn them into bonds, then rate them AAA instead of the high risk crap that they were. That was pure unmoderated capitalism and one of the strongest arguments ever for gov't oversight and anti-trust legislation.

The whole point of anti-trust law is that institutions don't become so important to the day to day of this country that we can't afford to let them go out. That the citizens of this country are not financially liable for the malfeasance of greedy bastards if they screw things up so bad they go out of business. Wrap your anti-government interference mind around that concept: Government interference PREVENTS Socialism. Because thats what it is when the government has to use TRILLIONS of dollars in taxes to prevent a full scale economic meltdown caused by private sector incompetence.

This happens everytime the government directly tries to change the markets that have created this country.

Using the rest of the article left on the cherry-picking floor, let's make the tax cuts permanent, let's take back the prescription drug benefit and let's raise interest rates. Since that is Bruce Bartlett's 3 main criticisms of Bush's economic policies, I'll support the Democrats when they introduce these 3 new bills.