Free Markets!

The Waning Days of the Years-Of-Bush are filled with cries about the "Death Of Free Markets."
Well, Good Ridddance, I say. Mostly because the so-called free markets never were actually free. Entry into the arena of free trade always reauired a fee. Money, Power, Connections, any of the above will do. To the worker who produces the goods and services being freely traded - Nothing.
Sorry; I got a little sidetracked there.
Something that came to me in a nightmare a while ago: Maybe, just maybe, if it's "Too Big To Fail", then it's also Too Big To Be Run For Short-Term-Profit to please the stockholders and generate bonus payments to senior management. If the gov't. (that's you and me, fellow taxpayer) is going to end up on the hook, why doesn't the gov't. have a sayso in the management? If the Interstate Highway System is infrastructure, the why arent the Cars and Trucks travelling on the highways also infrastructure? The vehicles are, like the roadway, merely conveyances for the delivery of people and products.
Now, this is a pretty radical thing to say; I imagine the proud owner of a hugely expensive and very shiny Land Yacht would consider it more as a prized possession than as a transportation device. Often, on the roads of America, the transportation part, implying movement, does not, in fact, apply to the multitudes clogging the asphalt. The prized personal conveyance (My Car!) ends up much more a status symbol than a device that can actually transport one from location A to location B. Without passing (sloowly) through locations A', A", A'"... en route. Not an efficient use of resources, one might say.
This radical notion of Infrastructure and State Participation would seem to apply equally to other areas where we are now seeing some marvelous examples of the ineptitude of management. Of course, we're seeing some pretty clear examples of the ineptitude of governmental management as well as of corporate management. Whether this is because of the incestuous relationship between Business and Government or vice versa, I'm not prepared to speculate now.
Perhaps Next Year.
God Bless Us Each And Every One.