Wall Street: Same Mistake Twice?

A year since the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros. plunged the U.S. into a massive financial crisis, Andrew Ross Sorkin of the NYTimes stated on Charlie Rose last night that to date, despite windstorms of rhetoric, no new regulatory restrictions have been imposed on Wall Street by the federal government and that hedge funds, money market funds, investment banks and other traders are venturing back into high-risk operations and the trading of newly fabricated and highly complex financial products, these activities said to be capable of producing a new crash as big as last year's, when trillions of dollars of personal savings were permanently lost and the economy as a whole came to close to plunging into a major depression.

This is a clear indication of the role gross irrationality plays in our national life. Addiction to the profit motive to the exclusion of all other values is like an addiction to crack, a pathology in which even the instinct for self-preservation is lost. As a wise person said: "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."