It is an important question because on our side of the aisle – in a desperate bid to stop socialism – we have become identified not so much as the party of free markets, but the party of big business. We’re trying to defend the right of a small businessman to run his business but we’re often ending up defendng the ability of a JP Morgan/Chase to loot the economy. We have to be careful about what we’re really about – and this article by Luigi Zingales is the best explanation I’ve seen. I do recommend reading the whole thing – here is what struck me as vitally important for our national debate:

…because the free-market system relies on this public support, and this support depends to a certain extent on the public’s impression that the system is fair, any erosion of that impression threatens the system itself. Such erosion occurs when government connections, or the power of entrenched incumbents in the market, seem to overtake genuine free and fair competition as the paths to wealth and success. Both government and big business have strong incentives to push the system in this direction, and therefore both, if left unchecked, pose a threat to America’s distinctive form of capitalism.

Although the United States has the great advantage of having started from a superior model of capitalism and having developed an ideology to support it, our system is still vulnerable to these pressures — and not only in a crisis. Even the most persuasive and resilient ideology cannot long outlive the conditions and reasoning that generated it. American capitalism needs vocal defenders who understand the threats it faces — and who can make its case to the public. But in the last 30 years, as the threat of global communism has waned and disappeared, capitalism’s defenders have grown fewer, while the temptations of corporatism have grown greater. This has helped set the stage for the crisis we now face — and left us less able to discern how we might recover from it.

In our financial system, especially, who among us would deny that entrenched interests heavily connected to government rule the roost? And if this is capitalism, then we can see why people are getting dismayed with it – but it isn’t capitalism; its a mockery of capitalism…a quasi-socialist, corporate-Statism counterfeit of a free market system. A place where the Masters of the Universe (in government and corporate board rooms) will stoutly assert that the market is free, but unless you come with suitable introductions, don’t try to enter it.

On our side, we must become the defenders of the free market against both Big Government and Big Corporation. Because someone works on Wall Street it doesn’t necessarily follow that he’s in love with freedom and the free market…he might be very much in love with sweetheart deals and backroom bribes. The author concludes in part:

We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro-market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can introduce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy…

And that is it, in a nutshell: pro-market, not pro-business. We don’t care if any particular business lives or dies. We only care that the playing field is level, that no one is getting a rake-off from the taxpayers and that anyone who wants to enter the field may do so. America is a meritocracy and it must remain such – if we cease to be a place where the little guy can get ahead, then we’ll just become another socialist dystopia heaving for slow death, as most of Europe is now.

Obama and his Democrats – along with the entrenched, big corporate interests – see this crisis as the prime opportunity to completely close down the avenues of advancement. They wish to freeze us in place and turn us in to mere cogs in a government/corporate machine…where government pretends to help us and corporations pretend to compete. It will be “fair” in the mind of the left because (a) the left will be in charge, (b) the top people in government and business will be very well off and (c) everyone will have just enough government hand-outs to maintain a comfortable slavery. But we won’t be free – and we will start to die, just as the Europeans have.

Our ancestors built this nation for the Average Man – not the privileged man and not the lazy man. Just the average person who wants to work hard, play fair and get ahead to the best of his abilities. As such a nation we will continue to grow and secure for the world this bastion of liberty – or, we can choose to go Obama’s route, and slip in to a senescent slavery, where bureaucrats in government and business tell us where to live, where to work, what to buy, how much money we’ll have…

I want to live in the America our ancestors built – where do you want to live?

The TEA Party laid down a marker regarding NY-23:

We are extremely disappointed that the Republican Party (and leaders like Newt Gingrich) has missed the message of the Tea Parties and continues to take conservative voters for granted. We applaud all courageous statesmen (Fred Thompson, Michelle Bachmann, and Dick Armey) and call on other GOP officials to put America’s values over traditional, often corrupt and morally bankrupt, power structures.

I understand the anger – in fact, I agree in principle with it. On the other hand, we need to have a care here. I’m a Republican and it will only by via the Republican Party that our nation will be rescued from Obama’s socialism and returned to our Founders’ constitutional republic. The Republican Party must stop recruiting RINOs on the theory that any “R” will do. The TEA Party movement must learn to be selective in expressing outrage.

As regards NY-23, this was (and is) an excellent means for the TEA Party to show the GOP establishment just how outraged the base is and how we’re not going to take having RINO’s foisted upon us by Beltway insiders who are afraid to fight it out in the realm of ideas. But to take some of the GOP establishment’s actions regarding NY-23 and apply it to the entirety of the GOP leadership is suicidal. Yes, Gingrich should have thought a bit harder – but he’s still one of us, and if we’re to get in to the game of condemnation for the slightest error, we might as well pack it in, go home and get ready for socialism. Meanwhile, in contrast to Gingrich there are many establishment GOPers who made the right choice – making blanket condemnations of the GOP for the failure of some just means we’d be cutting off the best of the best at the knees.

While our hero Barry Goldwater correctly noted that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, there is a vice in being intransigent. Don’t oppose just to oppose and don’t fly off the handle and condemn just because of a momentary lack of purity. Explain what you want; advise the erring why they’re wrong; work very hard for people who do get it – but leave the political suicide stuff at the door.

Its ok, you see?, he doesn’t work for just any, old greedy corporate behemoth, but for a government-bailed-out corporate behemoth:

The pay package given to Freddie Mac’s new chief financial officer should have sent a message from Washington to corporate America about how executive compensation standards must change. Instead, it did just the opposite.

The government-controlled mortgage finance company is giving CFO Ross Kari compensation worth as much as $5.5 million. That includes an almost $2 million cash signing bonus and a generous salary that could top $2.3 million.

Signing bonus? Is this a sports team?

Look, I don’t care how smart this guy allegedly is. I don’t care how much knowledge he’s supposed to have – I could do this job for, oh, $1 million per year…and if I needed some help keeping up with the books, I could take half my salary and distribute it amongst 5 accountants at 100 grand a pop and still leave myself an income more than sufficient to live as swank a life as anyone needs – especially if their pay is drawn out of the taxpayer’s pocket.

This is what is wrong with America: Big Government and Big Corporation simply don’t understand the lives of everyday Americans. Seriously – I’ll bet any amount that there isn’t single middle or lower income American who, if asked how much the CFO of Freddie Mac should make, would have come up with a figure greater than a few hundred thousand dollars. Its all the job is worth – and there is someone out there who would do a bang up job for such a salary. But people in Big Government/Corporation sat around and discussed the issue and figured that Kari needed $2 million just to walk through the door!

This is what we must fight against – we must make these cretins understand that they aren’t tin-platted little demigods living on a higher plane than the rest of us. They are just people who choose the path of least resistance – and thus work either in Big Government or Big Corporation where results are never really measured and the whole system is designed to hide incompetence. You can’t get away with this sort of nonsense at smaller firms – and a smaller government would inherently be more responsible with our money because they’d have less of it.

In 2010, we must start taking our country back – before the idiots who awarded a $2 million dollar signing bonus for a glorified accountant destroy us.

So much for hopeychanging us in to better foreign relations:

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, initially dubbed Sarko the American for his pro-U.S. stance, is finding it much tougher to deal with Washington than he had anticipated and is recalibrating his policies accordingly.

Stung by perceived snubs from U.S. President Barack Obama and encouraged by the growing importance of the G20, Sarkozy is increasingly reaching out to non-aligned states in an effort to extend France’s international influence.

He has forged especially close ties with Brazil, is seeking alliances in central Asia and is intensifying his activities in the Middle East, using multi-billion dollar military and civilian nuclear trade deals as his calling card.

These initiatives are being played out against a discordant tone in Franco-American relations…

The only people Obama is nice to are our enemies – and they repay his truckling by spitting in our eye.

Ok, Democrats – we understand: you were told for years that if only Bush were nicer then things would get better. It was mindless, but you believed it; and now your guy has implemented what you were certain would work. Well, it hasn’t – I’d like to say “I hate to say ‘I told you so'”, but I do take great joy in saying it – so: I TOLD YOU SO!!!! And so did everyone else with any sense at all.

That out of the way, it is time for you to re-think your views. Perhaps it is better to try and work with allies and oppose enemies? I know – radical thought! But it has been tried before and has had some success (WWI, WWII, Cold War, Gulf War, Liberation of Iraq, eg) – I know that is a rather thin record to go on, but given the abject failure of Obama policy, how about giving it a try?

Per the President, it is:

President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect noninfected patients.

The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the country and production delays undercutting the government’s initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.

Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.

I wasn’t aware until just now that 1,000 people have died of this strain of H1N1 – given we are just at the start of the flu season, this could be serious…on the other hand, I’ve heard lots of stories telling us to relax about the whole thing. Personally, I don’t know whether to be worried, or not.

Anyone out there got a better read on this?

But Obama says things are getting better:

he cascade of bank failures this year surpassed 100 on Friday, the most in nearly two decades. And the trouble in the banking system from bad loans and the recession goes even deeper than the number suggests…

…Bank failures have cost the FDIC’s fund that insures deposits an estimated $25 billion this year and are expected to cost $100 billion through 2013. To replenish the fund, the agency wants banks to pay in advance $45 billion in premiums that would have been due over the next three years.

The FDIC won’t say how deep a hole its deposit insurance fund is in. It can tap a credit line from the Treasury of up to a half-trillion dollars to cover the gap.

The list of banks in trouble is getting longer. At the end of June, the FDIC had flagged 416 as being at risk of failure, up from 305 at the end of March and 252 at the beginning of the year…

It was the end of June when the FDIC rated 416 banks at risk – its now the last part of October: anyone want to bet me the number has gone down? We can be pretty sure it hasn’t because if it had, the number would be out there. We can probably expect – given the number of Fridays left in 2009 – about 30 more banks to be seized…but that will leave hundreds at risk, and the FDIC is holding off on taking them over for lack of funds. Unless things turn around massively in 2010 – and there’s no indication they will – we’ll have several hundred bank failures next year.

But that’s not all – the supposed profits of the larger banks? Entirely bogus – they’d all be indicted for fraud except for the fact that Obama is protecting them. If you thought Enron’s accounting was corrupt, wait till you see what comes out in the by and by about our major financial institutions. They are all functionally insolvent and in 2010 as the smaller banks fall by the scores and hundreds, those big banks will be looking for another bail out. But where is the money for it to come from?

Its going to go from bad to worse – and made much worse by the happy talk out of the Administration and Wall Street which is convincing suckers to buy stocks. As long as we’re not creating new wealth – by increasing the amount we make, mine and grow – we’re just spinning our wheels and piling up more debt…

As an aside: for you liberals out there who will try to ignore this or spin it away, just for a moment be honest with yourselves and realize what you’d be doing if Bush were still President and we had 105 bank failures.

New Rasmussen survey:

For the first time in recent years, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on all 10 key electoral issues regularly tracked by Rasmussen Reports. The GOP holds double-digit advantages on five of them.

Republicans have nearly doubled their lead over Democrats on economic issues to 49% to 35%, after leading by eight points in September.

The GOP also holds a 54% to 31% advantage on national security issues and a 50% to 31% lead on the handling of the war in Iraq.

But voters are less sure which party they trust more to handle government ethics and corruption, an issue that passed the economy in voter importance last month. Thirty-three percent (33%) trust Republicans more while 29% have more confidence in Democrats. Another 38% are undecided. Last month, the parties were virtually tied on the issue.

As the economy worsens – or, at best fails to improve – that last issue will become crucial. The GOP was justifiably hammered in 2006 for corruption – now the Democrats are in charge and more and more people are realizing that while the GOP had corrupt members, Democrats have an endemic problem with corruption coupled with a complete unwillingness to do anything about it (at least we GOPers gave our corrupt members the boot). In the normal course of events, the GOP would have picked up 20-25 House seats next year – a bad economy, a corrupt government and a near-revolutionary ferment in the body politic might make things vastly different.

It will still take GOP leadership to translate all of the elements in to smashing GOP victory – but the ground is being laid, the Democrats are being exposed…and all we have to do is summon the courage and conviction to do what is right.

And that is a bit scary:

On Thursday night, Reid went over to the White House for a talk with the president. The conversation centered on Reid’s desire to put Schumer’s national opt-out plan into the base bill. White House officials were not necessarily pleased, and they made that known. Everyone agrees that they didn’t embrace Reid’s new strategy. Everyone agrees that the White House wants Snowe on the bill, feels the trigger offers a safer endgame, and isn’t convinced by Reid’s math. But whether officials expressed a clear preference for the trigger, or were just worried about the potential for 60 votes, is less clear. One staffer briefed on the conversation says “the White House basically told us, ‘We hope you guys know what you’re doing.'”

The country sure is in the best of hands, right?

From NRO’s Campaign Spot:

With his attendance at fundraisers for Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts today — boy, there’s a pair of popular incumbents — President Obama has now attended seven fundraisers since General Stanley McChrystal submitted his request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

Boy, it’s a shame Gen. McChrystal isn’t an unpopular incumbent Democrat; if he were, Obama might be more eager to help him out.

Your job, Mr. President, is to lead the nation – not bail out failing Democrats.

I guess they’ve entirely written off Virginia:

Sensing that victory in the race for Virginia governor is slipping away, Democrats at the national level are laying the groundwork to blame a loss in a key swing state on a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign that failed to fully embrace President Obama until days before the election.

Senior administration officials have expressed frustration with how Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has handled his campaign for governor, refusing early offers of strategic advice and failing to reach out to several key constituencies that helped Obama win Virginia in 2008, they say.

Rather ugly, isn’t it? The votes haven’t even been cast and the man groomed and selected by the Democrat establishment is already a political un-person in Democratic circles. Well, he did commit the only sin a Democrat acknowledges – the sin of losing. To be sure, he hasn’t actually lost, yet; but he will, and it looks like by a wide margin. Additionally, it looks as though the whole Democrat ticket in VA is going down with him.

So, Democrats, just one year after your sweeping triumph, you’re about to not just get beaten, but crushed, in Virginia. To be sure, you might eke out a win in New Jersey (I don’t think you will, but anything is possible), but a bare win in a heavily Democrat State will not take the sting out of losing a State you thought had fallen your way for good in 2008. Get used to it, Democrats – unless there is a massive turn around in the economy, November of 2010 will go just like November of 2009…except it will be nationwide…