Actually, the texas one has like 2 teachers. The other 7 folks or however many are all either politicians or christan fundamentalists. The majority of the board belives the world was created 6000 years ago.

Remove the word teacher and my opinion of the Texas Board is still pretty much true. Perhaps I am just a cynic have experienced it at the state and local level (different state).  I do not question their sincerity, just their wits.

I hope i dont sound "inflamatory", but unbridled capitalism was the reason for the economic meltdown of last year, and some *ugh* *shudders* socialistic-like measures need to be brought in.

This is a topic on free markets...

Those mortgage securities that imploded and took out the financial sector were not a product of unbridled capitalism.  The idiots that bought them definitely fell prey to stupidity and greed, but the products existed for an entirely statist reason.

Firstly, banks, mainly national chains, have been pressured, through the CRA and other wonderful legislation, to give loans to members of communities regardless of their ability to pay.  If they were found to be "discriminating" against a community by failing to meet a lending quota, they would be black listed.  During the Clinton administration, when they were improving these aspects, they added in wonderful things like handing over enforcement to the community organizers.  They gave legal standing to community activist groups and other such nuissance entities, the enforcement then went from "if we catch you" to "if they threaten to sue you" and the NINJA loans(again, set up by uncle) flew through the system to avoid black listing.

The GSE's, Fannie and Freddie, were set up earlier in life to create a market for low return lending.  A bank, which can't afford to be wasting their capital on something that might go belly up for a 6% return, wont make zero down loans.  The standard practice was 20%.  You pay 20% up front, and they'll give you a loan.  The reasoning being, if you go into default a few months in they've got that 20% cushion in value to take care of their expenses and maybe even make money off the soured deal.  Through the GSE's, they negated this problem by purchasing and then repackaging those loans as "guaranteed" securities.  The guarantee was the Uncle would bail them out if they went south, which they did, and Uncle did...

A 100% of value mortgage is worth less than it costs.  Only that guarantee makes it valuable by negating the risk.  It was social engineering, not unbridled capitalism.

Anyone seen the movie zeitgeist? In one part they mention how the federal reserve was just a a racket ring of big banking thugs who conned the us government into signing them into law, and that they basically are a private-owned, not federal, monopoly on people's wealth.  Now, I dont know if all of that is true, maybe not all, after all, it's an internet distributed movie.  But i dont think it's all 100% horsecrap either.

The CRA chatter is a red herring probably originated by bigots who wish it were still easy for local communities to practice redlining and appropriated by 'free market' zealots. Questionable loan products were peddled to plenty of people who would have been good candidates for a normal mortgage on a less expensive home, and the real culprit was not individual mortgages, but mortgages that were commodified via modern financial instruments like mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps.

Nowhere, as in Utopia. I used the shudder quotes because the 'free market' is an oxymoron, at least in any large society after the late Stone Age. Social order depends on both the allocation of scarce resources and the application of force to control behavior. Add a sufficient number of people and degree of technical complexity, and you end up driving Thomas Hobbes to write Leviathan.

Where do you live, Boulder? San Francisco? SoHo? Newton? Chicago?

Most people (as in a plurality of citizens of the United States) do not want a system that is "more socialist." Politicians avoid the word "socialism" unless they are using it to tarnish an opponent. Americans respond negatively to the word.

Okay, replace "socialism" with "collectivism," "welfare state," or "expanded entitlement programs" and you'll get the same response.

A question for all here, can you give any historical examples of any business or company being 'evil' without being in bed with the state?

Good luck finding one.

Also, Dr. Guy,

I think you might enjoy Mises.org

was enron in bed with the state? This is more of an intellectual curiosity than a challenge. But yea, Im curious.

This is a cart-before-horse muddle, complicated by that uselessly vague word "business." Corporations cannot exist without a state or states to establish their market context. One of the prime pathologies of 'evil' corporations is that they use their wealth and power to capture elements of government so they can increase their competitive advantages and/or suppress competitors.

So I guess my answer to your question is a follow-up question: Can someone give an historical example of a corporation succeeding without a nation-state to host it?

Nice try, but you know I won't sit still for that kind of paraphrase. My basic argument is that "the free market" is an idealistic abstraction, not a real-world possibility. Markets depend on rules, and viably enforcable rules depend on authority (i.e. 'legitimate' power). There is no such thing as "government infringement into the free market," merely variations in how governments exercises their powers to establish a market in the first place.

Have you really never read even the first half of Leviathan? Hobbes really seems like your sort of guy in many respects, being a miserable sod with some verbal flair and a tendency to theorize. Plus there's all that fun pre-dictionary-era spelling when he goes on about the "warre of all against all" and whatnot.