The lessons of the Bushracked economy:

[Missouri Blue]

If government doesn't interfere with business, business will interfere with government, and with tragic results.

Here's the list of laissez-faire disasters where business was "de-regulated, received "incentives" (read: subsidies), were awarded contracts with former and future industry executives doing the "regulating."

1) Enron (plenty of government incentives, no oversite)
2) Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff Mariana Island sweatshops.
3) Compromised airline safety, and delays when inspections finally became important.
4) New Orleans Katrina calamity.
5) The S&L scandal (I know it's before Dubya, but it was a de-regulation warning we should have heeded)
6) The Sub-prime crisis (caused by changing laws letting banks spread out into insurance, investment banking and brokerage. Thus they could insure Mortgage Backed Securities and sell them. Thank you Phil Graham.)
7) The Ethanol/food price phenomenon.
8) Nafta
9) Private Mercenaries in Iraq, like Blackwater, and privatization of our military's support systems (Thank you Donald Rumsfeld).
10) A recent discovery that private contractors doing collections for the IRS actually cost more money than they collected.

(thanks to Daniel Shore http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89661647)

Anybody want to take a crack at the continuing the list? It's longer, and I think it speaks for itself. I'm not in favor of total regulation, either. I'm a fan of the mixed economy.

On a few more topics: Taxes. Is there anything a Republican doesn't think a tax cut will do?

I hear about "distortions" to the economy, but I will point out that money collected by the government is not at all "lost" to the economy. We look at cash spent by the government on pie-graphs and it's natural to assume that it's lost. Actually, it's circulated to businesses, government employees and people at large. Even if it's say, lost to waste or corruption, unless it goes overseas or is hidden in a mattress, in some way, it must benefit the economy.

You can't really say that the government "wants power" or "wants money," unless there's somebody specific using government power to extend their power (J. Edgar Hoover comes to mind) or to enrich themselves.

Of course, that's the conservative motto about government: "small enough to fit in my pocket, large enough to write me a check."