Bright Eyes 2005 wrote:

Part of being a great entertainer, is entertaining.  It's ok to be the butt of a joke--"It's only Rock and Roll" and I like it.  Think of Jagger and Richards, they are running jokes, and use it to their benefit.  When you are as big as GNR, jokes go with the territory. It's a backhanded compliment in a sense.

I'm sorry but not in this case.  Again you can hide your head in the sand and pretend all is fine in GNR but it's not.  The last tour was not a huge success.  At least not in North America.  At the show I was at, when they played the new songs the crowd went silent.  That's not a good sign for an album that has supposedly received heavy promo for the last 5 years.

i was at the very same show and everyone loved the new songs.

This has nothing to do with the free market.  How can you call this evidence the free market failed when the whole reason it went under is because of regulations the government imposed on it.  These lenders would not have given money to a lot of people if federal law didn't require them too. 

This wasn't the free market at work here.  This was a market with its hands tied behind its back being told that it had to assume risks with a portion of the population because it made leftist feel good about themselves to force banks to loan money to poor minorities.

The answer here is to remove all regulation and force businesses and banks to compete which will lower costs.  People buying homes they can't afford or thinking they could make a quick buck on credit are tied into this as well.  Ultimately this comes down to people buying shit they shouldn't have and the democrats saying go ahead and buy it anyway because you should have the best quality of life you can imagine.

Now with Obama coming into office, it's only going to get worse.  We're going to have a President and Congress with no fiscal sense who are going to increase our national debt and continue these warped market policies to provide people with homes and items they can't afford on their own. 

Just look at the Soviet Union to see my point.  Their economy collapsed because they government tried to control it and didn't let the market work itself out.  Greed is a the driver behing an economy.  Greed is good.  The whole Reagan generation has this sense of entitlement that is a complete 180 from the WW2 era.  People think everything should be provided for them rather than having to work for it.  We're a society of instant gratification that only sees why lies in front of us. 

This is an epidemic that stems far from consumerism alone.  A perfect example is animal right morons who bitch and moan about cattle farms and "cruelty" to animals while they goto wal-mart and buy their nice, clean steak wraped in plastic.  They don't connect the dots.

Every "socialist" European nation has instituted free-market changes over the past 15 years and seen an increase in their economy.  American liberals (and dipshit soccer moms/nascar fans) fail to look at history and the world around them and acknowledge that "Hey, maybe it's a bad idea to use the same principles that got us into this mess to get us out of it."