Tzvi, I am afraid I agree completely with Pheasant here. Socialism (of this sort) is never justifiable or acceptable. By rewarding crony-capitalist monopolistic corporations with these obscene bailouts, we (in addition to raping the taxpayer) are only making sure that they will continue to go along as they have before, with the same old destructive and cannibalistic practices. Last time I checked, the feds themselves were in the hole to the tune of 430 billion dollars or something like that. Clearly, the whores of Washington can't afford to save everybody's donkey. Bailouts like the $85 billion one to AIG, only forestall the inevitable. These cancerous, rotted-out corporate corpses will come down soon enough no matter what the way the economy is.
I conceded earlier on that a total, cross-board economic collapse like this will suck big-time for many innocent people, but it's the only way the strong will be brought down. Only if these dinosaurs go extinct will there be a chance at new, upstart businesses and a real free market once again. If Congress hadn't unanimously voted to bail out the airlines after 9/11, who knows--maybe we would have, by now, several upstart airlines that actually charge reasonable rates and care about security. Do I like that our government is literally in bed with the monopolies and would never take them apart if their lives depended on it? No. I would much prefer that the gov't had dealt with these robber-barons ten years ago, before the economy was going down the tubes, but the reality of today is what it is and we shouldn't try to alter nature.
Brian, I don't agree that the Depression is what generated Hitler. The German people were always ferociously anti-Semitic, and were waiting only for a leader to come along who said and practiced what they wanted all along. Hitler (ys"vz) was just their man. If any particular event facilitated his rise, though, it was the "humiliating" defeat of Germany in WW1, which wounded Teutonic national pride very badly, and the "unfair" terms of Versailles (even though Germany's treatment of nations it conquered, and settlements it imposed, such as after the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 or Belgium in 1914 was far more ruthless).