In hindsight, I failed to add that deficit spending can be a good investment (even individually) depending on the project and rate of return. Nationally, I proposed that the goal should be to create jobs and renew or create infrastructure.

When you can't please all your critics; sometimes you just turn the other cheeks.

Economics is not an exact science; opinions and theories differ -- some catastrophically, as should be evident. If the stimulus works, the next step is fiscal reform. (For ordinary citizens, a rethinking of our consumerist lifestyle, is also necessary both as it affects our pocketbook and as it affects our natural environment.)

For the last few decades, perhaps since Ronald Reagan (and earlier, leading to the Great Depression), the prevailing macro-economic theory was that free market capitalism is self-correcting and needs no significant government oversight. The rationale went that those whose driving motivation was to make more and more profits and accumulate more and more power and wealth never cheat, lie, steal... or bully.

What disturbs me as much as anything is how often free market economics is conflated by the conservative right with "family values" and the near-fiction of a "Christian nation." Maybe I'm wrong, but I find the values of free-market capitalism mostly contrary to the values of Christianity.

Ayn Rand, writer and philosophical saint of free market capitalism, was the heroine of late Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Rand was forthrightly an atheist. I marvel that is not more widely known and discussed. Do I digress?

In 1999, with the public focused on wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, "family values," and "they're gonna get our guns" paranoia -- on a almost a straight party line vote, a Republican Congress quietly did something for which the financial industry had lobbied 20 years. They repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.

The doors to speculative banking were thrown wide open. Now, not just a few, but all banks could reduce their capital reserve requirements and create labyrinthine investment instruments. Private business was God; public government was Satan. The right wing said "That's okay -- 'cause my government and yours has no business messin' in business."

The right loves to lay the blame solely on sub-prime mortgages, and indeed that is a part (and surely worth another column) but more like a fire-cracker than a nuclear bomb. The nuke came from the unregulated and under-regulated fiscal system. Suddenly, there were these smoking hot "derivatives" -- bundles and re-bundles of exponential risk graded investment worthy by all-too compliant rating firms. Here's how the International Swaps and Derivatives Organization defines them.

"A derivative is a risk transfer agreement, the value of which is derived from the value of an underlying asset. The underlying asset could be a physical commodity, an interest rate, a company’s stock, a stock index, a currency, or virtually any other tradable instrument upon which two parties can agree. An over-the-counter (OTC) derivative is a bilateral, privately-negotiated agreement that transfers risk from one party to the other." Got that? Then there were even fuzzier categories called "credit default swaps" and "default futures" to bet on.

You know, like the old pig in a poke, but no pig -- just some slicker shaking the sack and going oink.