It is, indeed, naive to expect Wall Street to act as charitably as the Salvation Army, and you have to respect Fabulous Fab's brutal candor about this. Which brings us back to socialism.
Marx's predictions about the inevitable collapse of capitalism have been wrong so far because the system has worked reasonably well, thanks to the rules and redistributive programs established after the Great Depression.
The lesson is that the surest way to save capitalism is to regulate it in the public interest. The surest way to create socialists is for everyone to experience the economic consequences of counting only on the goodness in the hearts of Mr. Potter and Fabrice Tourre.
It was the unwinding of the post-Depression financial regulations, which allowed the free hand of the market to run loose, that brought us the worst recession since the Great Depression. There is a classic lesson here about human nature and it always amazes me that conservatives who supposedly believe in the lessons of human nature don't believe they apply in the economic arena. Or they don't care.
Capitalism only works well when it is heavily regulated by the government.
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