Complaints like this turn up ever so often, but I guess Paul is still bitter about losing the popularity contest back in high school (http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) and now wants to create a popularity contest that's geared towards him winning from the get-go. Can't keep him from doing that, all we can do is ignore the mods.
Not really. Both were chartered by Congress, and at best are considered quasi-private. This position (being quasi-private) may actually be worse than either totally private or totally public, but in any case isn't anything close to unfettered capitalism.
I'm going to put a premature stop to this by beating everyone to the punchline.
Libertarians: "It's always, everywhere, every time the government's fault. If the government would just get out of the way, everything would be roses and flowers in Libertopia".
Left-wingers: "You're on crack. This whole thing happened because we need more government regulation. If we could just get good regulations and put the people in power over greedy multi-national globalized corporate ... (and so on) ... we would be much better off!".
Real-worlders: "Libertopia is about as likely to work as Marxistan, the system we have is pretty good, but will always need some tweaking. There is plenty of scope for debate, on a case by case basis, looking at the actual facts and data for each case. Sometimes we should tack away from regulations, in other cases some government intervention might work to improve markets. In this case, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac were probably not that good an idea to begin with. Oh, and by the way, these sorts of debates probably don't belong on Hacker News;-)"
Oh, and by the way, "wholesale indictment of American capitalism" is just handwaving. "American capitalism" is an awfully broad range of things, from Joe's Corner Sandwich Shop to Goldman Sachs to, well, Y Combinator.
Pigeonholing commenters is kind of patronizing, isn't it? Those general arguments, in the right context and with the right facts, can all be reasonably made.
"The right context" is over a bottle of good wine, an offer open to anyone who happens by the same corner of the world I happen to be in. I didn't mean to be patronizing; there are smart people I respect that take those views, merely to 'head them off at the pass'.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Both groups had board appointees from the government. The market basically assumed they were "too big to fail", meaning if trouble happened, the government would take over.
When a company isn't run by it's shareholders and beholden to the market, bad things happen. Many of the choices made by both groups wouldn't have made it had there been better oversight.
Government involvement was the problem here, not capitalism.
Both Bussard and his most likely competitor, Eric Lerner, have done presentations on Google Tech Talks, you can find them on Google video. Bussard died the other day unfortunately. Lerner's technology, Focus Fusion, seemed a more likely candidate anyway, in his talk he briefly mentions how much closer he is than Bussard to achieving fusion.
Funny, the two most common labels I am hearing these days are not on the list: 'liberal' and 'conservative'. In political discussions a lot of ideas are suppressed - or at least verbally dismissed - using these labels.
Don't forget "moderate." Nobody liked Giuliani's being moderate, no no no. You're not safe ANYWHERE in the scale. Avoid it and you're "apathetic." Get too complex and you're "elitist" or "flip-flopping" or "hostile" (if the right crowd catches you trying to explain things).
While he was too moderate for some (as was, for instance, Clinton on the other side), can you find me an example where "moderate" was used as a term of abuse against Giuliani?
"Moderate" really doesn't seem to belong on the list. I can't imagine anyone ever looking shocked and saying "That's such a X thing to say" when X is "moderate", but it seems to fit for most of the other examples.
Even deeper: The American free-market libertarians pulled a coup when they were able to redefine, in public discourse, what it means to have 'liberty' (compare the definition of 'libertarian' ca. 1900 Europe and ca. 2000's USA).
In what sense? The progressive movement as currently constructed is not enamored with neither Leninism nor Stalinism, though there is sometimes a smidge of respect for Trotsky.
Things must be going really bad in America.