There is an H.L. Mencken quotation that captures the essence of this year’s politics: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” The media, economic “experts” and both presidential candidates are making bad-talking our economy key features of their campaign messages. For politicians and their hangers-on, keeping the populace alarmed is a strategy to seize more control over our lives. It’s so important that Sen. John McCain took his economic adviser, former Sen. Phil Gramm, to the woodshed for saying that America had “become a nation of whiners” and described the current slowdown as a “mental recession.” Had Sen. Gramm added that economically today’s Americans are better off than at any time in our history, he might have lost his job altogether. Let’s look at it.

With Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley becoming commercial banks, and the other three big investment banks/brokerage houses being acquired by commercial banks, politicians and the press won’t have Wall Street to kick around anymore. Headlines now shout about a $700 billion “Bailout for Wall Street.” Yet strictly speaking, Wall Street as we knew it no longer exists.

"The private sector got us into this mess. The government has to get us out of it,” said Barney Frank, which illustrates why conservatives often say liberals have a socialist bent.

Jim Cramer holds the SEC largely responsible for the current market mess. - “Christopher Cox and his crowd of academics and theoreticians did more to destroy the confidence of this market with their adherence to free-market destruction of stocks than any of the managements of the companies themselves,” Cramer writes.