If the government was capable of truly helping out those is need, I would be more supportive of measures to do so. But government is NOT immune to the forces of economics, despite what it claims it can shield people from that the private sector cannot.

Terrible things happen, but injecting government hurts as often as it helps. If you don't like a permanent underclass - don't support welfare, which is its main cause. If you don't like corporatism, don't support regulatory agencies, which inevitably get captured by the most powerful people in the industry, resulting in corruption, perverse incentives, and discriminate heavily against new businesses.

The State solution isn't a solution at all, and as much as we would like to see beneficial collectivism, ultimately government can only consume, not produce. They're takers before givers, and when they try to print money to avoid raising taxes, they devalue our savings and hurt our credit. The application of force (i.e. government) freezes things in time, but progress is always about the future, not the present.

Wisconsin, like a lot of states, is broke. They made promises they couldn't keep, and sadly people believed them.

This event having made me think a lot of it, I'm against so-called 'Right to Work' laws but only because of the employer's right to choose to deal exclusively with a union.

Mitch, should federal employees be unionized too?

If it's really so terrible, don't shop there (I'm guessing you don't - I didn't either until I went to college and became poor). If your community is dying because the majority of people are deciding that lower prices of goods for them is worth the loss of community it symbolizes, then so be it.

How can you blame the store? People choose to shop there, they choose to work there. No one's arm is being twisted, no one's being abused.

To return us to sanity - I don't care about this at all.

Capitalism is every individual choosing to do what they wish and trade when both parties think they'll benefit. There are no leaders in a capitalist system, just actors. Capitalism produces winners and losers, but every system does, and at least capitalism obliges you to enrich others before you can enrich yourself.

The Fed's activity and policies that subsidized home owning and lending caused the housing bubble, not greedy bankers (although there certainly are those). It's the government that perverted incentives to the point that neither lenders nor borrowers were able to accurately project what they could afford, and then they bailed out the banks and the wealthy with taxpayer money. Like most economic crises, the presence of government made things worse.

Obama's not socialism, but he is probably the most anti-business president in US history.