My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.
President Barack Obama to the leaders of the banking industry
I’m as angry as anybody about banker’s folly, and I’ve as much a victim of it as most people – no, more than most – but the thought that our president thinks of himself in these terms and that he would use this rhetoric is more than a little unnverving for someone who values our political and legal system.
Regulation, remember, is always done by a regulator – a person who has good days and bad and a person whom you had better treat with deference when he tells you how hot you can run your water.
I can’t find the evidence that tells us we are a better nation because of the regulators. I can see that we are addicted to them, as we must be if we try to build a world on materialist foundations. Nothing else can restrain people.
In other words, we are lost.
