Scott,
If you really want to understand what's going on, just sifting through endless details really won't get you there. you have to step back a bit and consider the processes at work.
You could go to any society in the world, or in history and you will find liberal components, those seeking to push the boundaries of convention, as well as conservatives, those seeking to strengthen and re-enforce cultures and conventions.
The problem is that we have this linear, goal oriented monist idealism as the default assumption of society, so each side of the cycle sees themselves on the road to nirvana and those going the other way as ignorant fools.
What drives us is desire for transcendence, but what steers us is judging among alternatives. The heart and the head. The fact is that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. Nor does every acorn get to be an oak tree. If we don't do some of the selection, nature will do it all for us. It is a finite planet and we have to accept that dealing with limits is what defines and teaches us.
Though in our somewhat monolithic culture, we all seek the same goals and it becomes winner take all, but nature's game is more like Rock, Paper, Scissors, where positive feedback becomes negative feedback, when we think we have it made.
The economic fallacy is that we equate capitalism with a market based economy, yet markets need money to circulate, while people see it as the signal to extract and store. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted. Since it mostly functions as a contract, with the asset backed by a debt, that means creating the debt to back the assets.
One way is to squeeze the flow of money through the necessary economy, requiring it to run on debt and draw the saved money back into circulation. Which creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges. Which has gone on since the dawn of civilization, as the Ancients used debt jubilees to reset the process.
Another is having the government as debtor of last resort. It should be overwhelmingly obvious that the financial markets could not function, without the government siphoning up trillions in surplus money. Yet that seems to be ignored by the mainstream. The sercet sauce of capitalism is that public debt backs private wealth.
The fact is that there isn't the investment potential to save what we need, but we do save for many of the same reasons, so eventually we will have to reinvent the idea of the public commons, as a way to store communal wealth, rather than everyone trying to squeeze value out of everything, in order to store as digits in the accounting system, ie, banks.
Government, as the executive and regulatory function, is analogous to the central nevous system, while money and banking are analogous to blood and the circualtion system. There was a time when government was private, but monarchs lost sight of the fact they served a function to society, in order to be served by it. Now banking is having its "Let them eat cake." moment.
