Reply #183: No, pay plenty of attention to the man behind the curtain. [View All]

[Unvanguard]

But don't mistake the man behind the curtain for anyone in particular you happen not to like.

So: blame the banks and financial institutions, blame the poor regulation that let them do what they did, hell, blame capitalism-as-it-actually-works for essentially being set up in a way that allows powerful economic institutions to gamble with other people's lives and livelihoods. Unlike the people you should actually be arguing with, I agree with all of that, and the neoliberal system--which, though it seems to escape some of the people here sometimes, actually encompasses a whole lot more than trade--ought to be called account for enabling it (though it is probably a feature of capitalism as such to a degree, and will only go away entirely when we replace that system.)

But this thread, instead, attempts an analysis that, while undoubtedly building on real worries about outsourcing, simply fails to understand how a recession actually works. It thus implicitly suggests a policy prescription that is unsuited to the problem it points out, and, indeed, distracts from the very real causes we could be discussing.