Jay Naylor, on Twitter, wrote:The last meltdown was caused by regulation aiming to turn the housing and banking markets into welfare programs.

What really happened was that abolishing Glass Steagall and other such regulations implemented after the Great Depression, to stop it happening again, enabled the banks to merge the savings and investment side of banking together. Creating the same systemic risk that existed back then.

Mortgages became more accessible when the central banks slashed interest rates, an effort to manipulate the market out of a recession after the dot-com bubble burst. This created both the credit and housing bubble, as interest rates were so artificially low that the risk of loaning to people was minimal.

The banks made massive profits by buying up these mortgages and using them to back investment products called Collateralized Debt Obligations or CDOs. These were cut up into graded slices depending on risk, with the riskier slices offering better returns. Enabling average investors to profit from interest on mortgage repayments by effectively buying a slice of the mortgage.

Due to the central bank rates being so low, savings accounts did not offer worthwhile rates. The higher paying CDOs were therefore very popular, but their supply was limited by the availability of mortgages. Collaborating with credit rating agencies and mortgage lenders, the banks got anyone with a pulse to buy a house; so that they could turn it into a CDO. With the credit rating agencies grading these high risk sub-prime mortgages as AAA investments.

When the mortgages went bust, the CDOs backed by them followed. Every bank who had gone into millions, even billions into debt to get into the CDO game suddenly found themselves overloaded with toxic assets and unable to repay their debts. The credit system grinded to a halt as people were afraid to loan money. Because the investment side of banking had merged with the saving side, the investment banks going bust threatened general saving and deposit accounts. The entire banking system risked collapse, the very thing Glass Steagal was implemented to prevent.

The crisis of 08 was caused by greed and a lack of sound regulation. Suggesting the banks weren't complicit in this high risk and highly profitable activity, that the government forced them, is absurd.

Please also note that Objectivism propagates the practices that lead to the collapse.

And if that's too much text, here's some audio-visual material.

Free markets have resulted in unparalleled growth and prosperity for the human race. Dicksonian fiction notwithstanding.

While it's true that the free markets of the late 1800s resulted in the biggest economic boom of any nations history, we live in a very different world than the Capitalist golden age. Globalism means competing with the slave wage labour in 3rd world countries which didn't exist when America was a global industrial powerhouse. Regardless of how free you make the market, they will always choose the cheap foreign labour over the expensive local labour. There wouldn't be an explosion of jobs by deregulations businesses, international corporations do not have loyalties to any one country, they just base themselves where they will be taxed the smallest.

As a society we also care more about taking care of those less fortunate than ourselves, were as the free market principle will happily let a family starve if they are of no use to business. Dickens didn't just write fiction about poverty, he included the poverty he witnessed throughout his life in his fiction. Populations are much larger; while technology has made us much more productive. That is a lot of excess population left to rot. You can produce all the goods in the world, using the cheapest possible labour, it won't help you if there isn't anyone to buy it.

Free market Capitalism may have been useful in the past, but it would be very difficult to recreate that sort of prosperity today. There simply isn't enough human resource demand in today's society for government to completely step out of the market, regardless of how free it is made. To compete with slave wage labour is to become it, you could argue. That isn't prosperity.

I don't know what he means by "Dicksonian fiction" as Dickson wrote about contemporary problems of his deregulated age. Could it be someone didn't do his research? Hhmmmm.

To make this perfectly clear: the practices preached by Objectivists would render our world into a Social Darwinist nightmare in which robber barons are free to exploit the masses (and children) and the poor decompose in the streets like they already did in the past.

But why do I have to say all that?

It's known for years.

In fact, Objectivism as a whole has been thoroughly debunked.

Kindly note the section about their habit of distorting a word's meaning. Puts a new complexion on his whole tweets about using the "correct" terminology, doesn't it?

Fun Fact: Free will as such doesn't exist. We're deterministic biochemical machines. Another one of Objectivism's foundations destroyed.

So, what's left to say?

Oh yeah, one thing.

Am convinced the strategy of the left is to wear me down by asking me to explain the same things to different people endlessly before I die.

Hah, comedy gold. I never knew I was left and always thought I was merely a centrist, but if a genius like Naylor says it, it must be true. I'm the representation of every single leftie. Of course.

But I think the logical inverse is more true to reality.

I'm convinced the strategy of the right is to brainwash the whole populace by obstinately feeding it the same old lies and distortions, no matter how many times they have been debunked, in order to improve America for the worse.

Only I have the facts on my side.