what's important is having professional economists running the country instead of hack politicians backed by selfish and greedy corporate interest who care only for their own welfare and that of their company and not the country and its people as a whole.

The top 10% have 80% to 90% of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity...

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Luke 12:48 (KJV)
" . . . For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more."

This is the total credit market debt from 1920 on as a percent of GDP (so it is inflation adjusted). You see, all Wall Street does is peddle whatever we produce. Unfortunately our main export in the last 25 years has been debt.

The biggest culprit here is the Fed though - the steepest sections of this graph correlate strongly with very low interest rate regimes. What banks do makes very good sense in the context of the sandbox they are given. Right now there is no incentive to even take deposits - it is cheaper to borrow at a negative effective rate from the Fed and loan it back to the Government to misallocate, which leads to recession after recession.

The French Revolution is the template for all mob uprisings, and the signal event of that lunacy was an attack on a prison housing only half a dozen prisoners.

As best anyone can tell, the storming of the Bastille was instigated by a rumor that the laughably impotent King Louis XVI was about to stage an attack on the National Assembly. Or perhaps they were upset that the inept finance minister, Jacques Necker, had been fired. Or they thought the Bastille was an eyesore.

(The only other possible cause was recently ruled out when it was conclusively determined that France had no teachers unions in the late 18th century.)

No one is sure -- but a good time was had by all! Except the prison administrators murdered in the attack.

Liberals love mobs because rioting and anarchy is their path to power.

Making sound proposals based on facts and logic is not their metier. Issuing impossible promises to the easily fooled is their specialty. For more on this, see "The 2012 Democratic Platform."

The entire Democratic Party is currently promising to "save" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in their present form. According to Obama's own Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in less than 10 years, spending on those three entitlement programs, plus servicing the national debt, will consume 92 cents of every dollar in the federal budget.

The Democrats are openly lying to voters. It is a mathematical impossibility for these programs to continue without major reform now, or complete bankruptcy later -- and not very much later.

But Democrats' real achievement has been in destroying the family, and thereby creating an endless supply of potential rioters.

When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them! Barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began, the black illegitimacy rate has tripled to 72 percent.

Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has septupled, from 4 percent to 29 percent.

Instead of a "War on Poverty," it should have been called a "War on the Family."

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their Trojan horse "benefits" flowing.

It's the Democrats' "heroin dealer" model of government.

Apparently, it takes a lot of government workers to minister to the poor, inasmuch as government employment has skyrocketed in tandem with the family's disintegration. As long as Democrats are serving their principal constituency -- recipients of taxpayer money -- they don't care what happens to the rest of society.

They champion any mob that will increase their political power. Liberals promote welfare dependency, class warfare, endless government programs staffed with public sector workers, street protests, coddling criminals and physical attacks on their ideological opponents. This is how they create reliable Democratic voters.

True, government employees are doing jobs we don't want done, can never be fired, are bankrupting the country and periodically break out in mob violence.

True, also, that the children of broken families sometimes burn city blocks to the ground or kill their great-grandmothers with swords. But what a voting bloc!