The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act: Why Libertarians Should Be Evicted From the Country

[Delivery Dragon **]

So the US government once passed a law that reversed the regulations that we put into place for the specific purpose of preventing another Great Depression. The so-called Dot-Com Bubble directly followed. Instead of learning their lessons like they were supposed to, the conservative libertarians in Congress continued along with the same stupid shit. Following that economic disaster, there was a lovely spending spree in the housing market, and then the economy ran into a brick wall because people couldn't borrow anymore. By the way, my generation is paying the bill.

Umm...why?

[Jason]

Ah, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (a.k.a., the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999): one of the reasons Alan Greenspan thought Clinton "was the best Republican president we’ve had in a while."

[dismal]

Libertarians?

The guys who are always after the Lucky Charms?

[Delivery Dragon **]

Originally Posted by Jason

Ah, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (a.k.a., the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999): one of the reasons Alan Greenspan thought Clinton "was the best Republican president we’ve had in a while."

Forget Alan Greenspan. That douchebag was part of a stupid clique that had literally no self-justification except making libertarianism into a fucking pointless religion. Greenspan is a waste of time.

What I want to know is why my generation has to pay the price for single dumbest act of government in living memory? And there was literally no point to it. It had literally no point to it at all. There was literally no reason at all to expect anything from it besides the present economic calamity.

There was just no fucking point.

[Voice of reason]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

So the US government once passed a law that reversed the regulations that we put into place for the specific purpose of preventing another Great Depression. The so-called Dot-Com Bubble directly followed. Instead of learning their lessons like they were supposed to, the conservative libertarians in Congress continued along with the same stupid shit. Following that economic disaster, there was a lovely spending spree in the housing market, and then the economy ran into a brick wall because people couldn't borrow anymore. By the way, my generation is paying the bill.

Umm...why?

I would like to see the full list of Libertarian registered congress members please.

Yeah those Libertarians they are in total control of our government.

[quasimodo]

Originally Posted by Voice of reason

I would like to see the full list of Libertarian registered congress members please.

Yeah those Libertarians they are in total control of our government.

Ron Paul is a registered Republican, but most see him as a Libertarian. He opposed the bill.

http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/co...110899-glb.htm

The negative aspects of this bill outweigh the benefits.

I agree on the need for reform but oppose this approach.

This increased indication of the government's eagerness to bail out highly-leveraged, risky and largely unregulated financial institutions bodes ill for the post S. 900 future

My main reasons for voting against this bill are the expansion of the taxpayer liability...

[Shedinja5000]

The problem isn't libertarians, it's neoliberalism - the economic religion that says the "Invisible Hand of [strike]God[/strike] the free market is always right." Neoliberals think that, except for monetary policy and military/police spending, any government involvement in the economy is always evil incarnate. (though there are people who subscribe to most of the basic principles of neoliberalism but aren't nearly as fanatical about it, just like in other religions - for example, the Swedish Social Democratic Party) Neoliberals can be libertarians or conservatives, and at least in Sweden, there are neoliberals who would qualify as centrists. But whether neoliberals are conservatives, libertarians, or centrists, the simple fact is that neoliberalism is based on a flawed premise - there is no invisible hand, just as there are no gods.

The free market can only work properly when the visible hand of the government is there to restrain the idiots that think, for example, that it's impossible for housing prices to decrease. Or the even bigger idiots that think that the fact that the North and South Poles are melting at a rapid rate is purely natural phenomenon, and indeed, beneficial. Otherwise, the whole house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later - either into a depression, or potentially in the case of environmental degredation, into a full-scale collapse of civilization.

[Manitoumulegirl]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

What I want to know is why my generation has to pay the price for single dumbest act of government in living memory?.

So which generation are you a member of? You must be a youngster to become so petulent over having to bear the fall-out from the lastest set of government shenanigans. I am older and people should be nice to me, but they're not. Oh well.

[ZiprHead]

Libertarianism is a strange religion. The belief that if everyone just did what was in their own best interest, the world would be all happy and care-free. It never works out in reality. It's like cells of the body. If they work only in their own best interest, they grow and multiply until they damage or kill the host. We call that cancer.

[Delivery Dragon **]

Originally Posted by Voice of reason

I would like to see the full list of Libertarian registered congress members please.

There are none. You are using "Libertarian" as a proper noun. I am not. The GOP follows a basically conservative-libertarian economic platform, therefore the GLBA. Now, I think that you were aware of this, and you were consciously attempting to evade the point. By contrast, I am making a case right now for packing the libertarians onto a boat, and shipping them out. We don't need the fucks.

In case the punks at the back of the class were not paying attention, I want to know why my generation is paying for your generation's fuck-ups, which you were warned about over and over and over and over and over. Was there any point at all to the GLBA?

The way I see it, you fucks decided that it would be a good idea to deregulate the economy, so you could watch it go super duper fast, and crash repeatedly into brick walls. It's a bit like watching NASCAR, isn't it? Was it fun?

Libertarianism is nothing but a really dumb clique that is excited over the idea of implementing their ideology to some unjustifiable extreme. They don't care at all if it results in a jump in the unemployment rate. They are living in a lalalalaladadada-land where everything is working out just fine as long as their ideals are being implemented to the greatest extreme possible.

No, they will not reconsider their ideals if it turns out that those ideals are ineffective at generating social prosperity. Like the communists, the libertarians are just going to spend the next several decades trying to persuade us that their ideas have "never really been tried." When you are dealing with people who are too stupid to learn, this is what you will always get.

If we don't start being more forceful in rejecting the libertarian ideology, then they are just going to make another push to get the same bullshit implemented, and our economy is going to go further downhill than it already has.

The libertarians aren't going to learn their lessons. The only thing that has any meaning in their lives is to try that ideology of theirs "one more time," just to see if it works out differently. Like compulsive gamblers, they are just going to keep pushing their luck until they have nothing left to bet.

In their minds, they have absolute faith in the idea that, if they just had it their way, all the way, it would all work out somehow. If it doesn't, oh well. It was somebody else's fault, anyway.

[quasimodo]

Originally Posted by ZiprHead

Libertarianism is a strange religion. The belief that if everyone just did what was in their own best interest, the world would be all happy and care-free. It never works out in reality. It's like cells of the body. If they work only in their own best interest, they grow and multiply until they damage or kill the host. We call that cancer.

[quasimodo]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

There are none. You are using "Libertarian" as a proper noun. I am not. The GOP follows a basically conservative-libertarian economic platform, therefore the GLBA. Now, I think that you were aware of this, and you were consciously attempting to evade the point. By contrast, I am making a case right now for packing the libertarians onto a boat, and shipping them out. We don't need the fucks.

In case the punks at the back of the class were not paying attention, I want to know why my generation is paying for your generation's fuck-ups, which you were warned about over and over and over and over and over. Was there any point at all to the GLBA?

The way I see it, you fucks decided that it would be a good idea to deregulate the economy, so you could watch it go super duper fast, and crash repeatedly into brick walls. It's a bit like watching NASCAR, isn't it? Was it fun?

Libertarianism is nothing but a really dumb clique that is excited over the idea of implementing their ideology to some unjustifiable extreme. They don't care at all if it results in a jump in the unemployment rate. They are living in a lalalalaladadada-land where everything is working out just fine as long as their ideals are being implemented to the greatest extreme possible.

No, they will not reconsider their ideals if it turns out that those ideals are ineffective at generating social prosperity. Like the communists, the libertarians are just going to spend the next several decades trying to persuade us that their ideas have "never really been tried." When you are dealing with people who are too stupid to learn, this is what you will always get.

If we don't start being more forceful in rejecting the libertarian ideology, then they are just going to make another push to get the same bullshit implemented, and our economy is going to go further downhill than it already has.

The libertarians aren't going to learn their lessons. The only thing that has any meaning in their lives is to try that ideology of theirs "one more time," just to see if it works out differently. Like compulsive gamblers, they are just going to keep pushing their luck until they have nothing left to bet.

In their minds, they have absolute faith in the idea that, if they just had it their way, all the way, it would all work out somehow. If it doesn't, oh well. It was somebody else's fault, anyway.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

In case the punks at the back of the class were not paying attention, I want to know why my generation is paying for your generation's fuck-ups, which you were warned about over and over and over and over and over. Was there any point at all to the GLBA?

We're all paying for it. People of all generations who own their own businesses are having trouble getting credit and are unable to keep their businesses open. People of all generations are currently unemployed or are in the process of being laid-off. People of all generations have had their 401(k) plans and pension funds decimated. But I agree with you that we need to move far, far away from unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. I think ZiprHead sums it up best:

Libertarianism is a strange religion. The belief that if everyone just did what was in their own best interest, the world would be all happy and care-free. It never works out in reality. It's like cells of the body. If they work only in their own best interest, they grow and multiply until they damage or kill the host. We call that cancer.

[ksen]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

So the US government once passed a law that reversed the regulations that we put into place for the specific purpose of preventing another Great Depression. The so-called Dot-Com Bubble directly followed. Instead of learning their lessons like they were supposed to, the conservative libertarians in Congress continued along with the same stupid shit. Following that economic disaster, there was a lovely spending spree in the housing market, and then the economy ran into a brick wall because people couldn't borrow anymore. By the way, my generation is paying the bill.

Umm...why?

What did the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allow that wasn't allowed before that caused the dot.com and housing bubbles?

By the way, did you know that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed 90-8 in the Senate? I didn't realize all those Democrats were actually libertarians in disguise.

[Delivery Dragon **]

Originally Posted by Jason

We're all paying for it.

The libertarians aren't. The only thing they care about is shoving their crappy, pointless, lunatic ideology down everybody else'se throats. They should be evicted from the country.

People of all generations

In case you haven't realized it, kids in their late teens and early twenties are more vulnerable than anyone to the consequences of your mistakes, which you still aren't keen on taking responsibility for. What happens to people at this point in their lives tends to determine their entire future.

If you were one of those punks who were all rah-rah over those fucking stupid deregulation schemes, you may have fucked-up my life, man. I've been resourceful enough to change my career track to something I can use more readily, but you sure threw a monkey wrench into my dreams.

The deregulation schemes just don't work. They are never going to work. It's like saying that traffic in the big city would move faster if we took away the speed limits and abolished traffic lights. It's ignorant. They only person who won't be screwed by it will be some bundok farmer in South Dakota somewhere.

And I know what the libertarians are going to do. There is no reason to expect any different behavior from these punks than we saw from the communists. "You can't say that libertarianism failed because no country has ever tried it." Does that bullshit sound familiar?

They don't want to change. They are never going to change. No matter how thoroughly their bullshit is disproven, they are going to cling to the same lunatic ideology until they day they die. The only answer is to evict these assholes from the premises. They can go bother Osama bin Laden with their pointless bullshit.

[Delivery Dragon **]

Originally Posted by ksen

By the way, did you know that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed 90-8 in the Senate?

The Democrats passed it along because it was the only way they would be able to strengthen the laws against redlining, being a minority in Congress at the time.

To refresh your memory, it's the measures against red-lining that you guys have been trying to blame for the current crisis.

[boneyard bill]

Originally Posted by Shedinja5000

The problem isn't libertarians, it's neoliberalism - the economic religion that says the "Invisible Hand of [strike]God[/strike] the free market is always right." Neoliberals think that, except for monetary policy and military/police spending, any government involvement in the economy is always evil incarnate. (though there are people who subscribe to most of the basic principles of neoliberalism but aren't nearly as fanatical about it, just like in other religions - for example, the Swedish Social Democratic Party) Neoliberals can be libertarians or conservatives, and at least in Sweden, there are neoliberals who would qualify as centrists. But whether neoliberals are conservatives, libertarians, or centrists, the simple fact is that neoliberalism is based on a flawed premise - there is no invisible hand, just as there are no gods.

The free market can only work properly when the visible hand of the government is there to restrain the idiots that think, for example, that it's impossible for housing prices to decrease. Or the even bigger idiots that think that the fact that the North and South Poles are melting at a rapid rate is purely natural phenomenon, and indeed, beneficial. Otherwise, the whole house of cards inevitably collapses sooner or later - either into a depression, or potentially in the case of environmental degredation, into a full-scale collapse of civilization.

If you're going to call other people idiots, you should get your own facts straight. Libertarians certainly weren't the ones claiming the housing prices couldn't decrease. And the South Pole isn't melting at a rapid rate.

[CoyoteTheClever]

Wait, which libertarians are we banning now? And how is this supposed to help the country? If you've banned the right libertarians (Who might make up only 70% of the party now thanks to the Glenn Beck crowd influx), then your economic greed has gotten rid of like 2% of the country that does actually support things like gay marriage and abortion. Congratulations for helping Christian hegemony and throwing out a group that didn't have one vote in this thing. If you want to ban the Republicans, then by calling them libertarians you've failed politics forever. If you want to ban the Glenn Beck "Libertarians", then not only have you fallen into their trap by accepting their self label (An American mistake done over and over again by accepting the Nazis self-label as socialists as well and thereby completely failing at any sort of political knowledge once again), you've also punished a group for a crime they didn't exist at the time to commit. Then again, I could still get on board for banning them from the country for various other reasons. If you want to ban -all- libertarians, self-identified or not, then you've even thrown out great thinkers like Chomsky and other various leftists from this country. Congrats.

You are better off saying "Fuck the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this particular bill and the corporations that bought it" than making idiotic political statements towards a group of people who had nothing to do with it, whether they supported it or not. We can play the "lets blame minority X for all our troubles" whenever we want, but it isn't productive, and it is flat our dangerous when it is coming from majority X.

[Jason]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

In case you haven't realized it, kids in their late teens and early twenties are more vulnerable than anyone to the consequences of your mistakes, which you still aren't keen on taking responsibility for. What happens to people at this point in their lives tends to determine their entire future.

My mistakes? What mistakes might those be?

And why are you being so belligerent towards me? You don't seem to know my age or anything else about me (such as the fact that I've never supported things like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act because I believe a certain amount of outside intervention in the market is necessary, whether in the form of stricter regulations and oversight or outright nationalization).

That's some seriously misplaced anger.

[quasimodo]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

The libertarians aren't. The only thing they care about is shoving their crappy, pointless, lunatic ideology down everybody else'se throats. They should be evicted from the country.

In case you haven't realized it, kids in their late teens and early twenties are more vulnerable than anyone to the consequences of your mistakes, which you still aren't keen on taking responsibility for. What happens to people at this point in their lives tends to determine their entire future.

If you were one of those punks who were all rah-rah over those fucking stupid deregulation schemes, you may have fucked-up my life, man. I've been resourceful enough to change my career track to something I can use more readily, but you sure threw a monkey wrench into my dreams.

The deregulation schemes just don't work. They are never going to work. It's like saying that traffic in the big city would move faster if we took away the speed limits and abolished traffic lights. It's ignorant. They only person who won't be screwed by it will be some bundok farmer in South Dakota somewhere.

And I know what the libertarians are going to do. There is no reason to expect any different behavior from these punks than we saw from the communists. "You can't say that libertarianism failed because no country has ever tried it." Does that bullshit sound familiar?

They don't want to change. They are never going to change. No matter how thoroughly their bullshit is disproven, they are going to cling to the same lunatic ideology until they day they die. The only answer is to evict these assholes from the premises. They can go bother Osama bin Laden with their pointless bullshit.

LOL. Get a clue, kid.

[boneyard bill]

Originally Posted by Delivery Dragon

There are none. You are using "Libertarian" as a proper noun. I am not. The GOP follows a basically conservative-libertarian economic platform, therefore the GLBA. Now, I think that you were aware of this, and you were consciously attempting to evade the point. By contrast, I am making a case right now for packing the libertarians onto a boat, and shipping them out. We don't need the fucks.

In case the punks at the back of the class were not paying attention, I want to know why my generation is paying for your generation's fuck-ups, which you were warned about over and over and over and over and over. Was there any point at all to the GLBA?

The way I see it, you fucks decided that it would be a good idea to deregulate the economy, so you could watch it go super duper fast, and crash repeatedly into brick walls. It's a bit like watching NASCAR, isn't it? Was it fun?

Libertarianism is nothing but a really dumb clique that is excited over the idea of implementing their ideology to some unjustifiable extreme. They don't care at all if it results in a jump in the unemployment rate. They are living in a lalalalaladadada-land where everything is working out just fine as long as their ideals are being implemented to the greatest extreme possible.

No, they will not reconsider their ideals if it turns out that those ideals are ineffective at generating social prosperity. Like the communists, the libertarians are just going to spend the next several decades trying to persuade us that their ideas have "never really been tried." When you are dealing with people who are too stupid to learn, this is what you will always get.

If we don't start being more forceful in rejecting the libertarian ideology, then they are just going to make another push to get the same bullshit implemented, and our economy is going to go further downhill than it already has.

The libertarians aren't going to learn their lessons. The only thing that has any meaning in their lives is to try that ideology of theirs "one more time," just to see if it works out differently. Like compulsive gamblers, they are just going to keep pushing their luck until they have nothing left to bet.

In their minds, they have absolute faith in the idea that, if they just had it their way, all the way, it would all work out somehow. If it doesn't, oh well. It was somebody else's fault, anyway.

It's bad enough that you spout nonsense, but why do we have to listen to you brag about your ignorance?

Glass-Steagel and other regulations were passed during the depression or with depression-era problems in mind. The modern era is faced with a very different problem - inflation. Since we left the gold standard in 1933 the dollar has lost 95% of it's value. That means prices have gone up about 20 times.

Banks and savings and loans borrow short-term and lend long-term. It was inflation that caused the S%L crisis of the '80's and 90's. Savings and loans had to borrow money at close to double-digit rates, but they were stuck with long-term mortgages that often paid only 4%. They became insolvent, so Congress "de-regulated" the industry. Of course, they didn't actually de-regulate. They merely changed a few rules to allow S&L's to engage in more diversified investments. The changes probably allowed a great many S&L's to survive, but they came too late for many others.

Why must we assume that a regulation, once passed, becomes inviolable? Why is it that changes in regulations automatically become characterized as "de-regulation" even though most of the regulations remain in place?

Why should you expect that depression-era regulations would be appropriate for an entirely different economic environment?

Have you EVER, for one second, even contemplated that there might be valid reasons why the overwhelming majority of Congressmen and Senators voted for these changes and made any attempt whatsoever to find out what those reasons might have been? The Congressional hearings and debates are a matter of public record and are probably available on the internet.

Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in economics. Do you think he supported these changes out of pure ideology with no ability to contemplate their economic effects?

Commercial banks were not hit as badly as the S&L's over the problem of borrowing short and lending long because they were permitted more diversified investments. But it was still a problem. Those prohibitions still made banks highly vulnerable to inflation.

The preferred solution to this problem, as I see it, would be to not inflate. But our politicians can't bear to give up that benefit which allows them to tax us indirectly and put the blame on someone else. So that wasn't likely to happen soon.

The point is that this 'de-regulation' was a response to inflation.

The financial services reform was not passed for no reason whatsoever as you claim.

Secondly, how would these reforms cause the dot.com bubble? Commercial banks are not part of the dot.com industry. Why would a de-regulation of financial services lead me to buy Yahoo?

If the money supply grows in excess of the growth of the economy, the excess money is going to push up prices. If it pushes up consumer prices, we call it inflation. If it pushes up asset prices we call it a bubble. Either way, the cause is an increase in the supply of money.

De-regulation of an industry might allow the money to flow into an area where it might not otherwise have gone, but the excess money still has to go somewhere.

Of course, the government can't give an artificial stimulus to the economy forever. Eventually it has to pull back on money creation. This causes the bubble to burst. Then we get a recession. This is what happened in 2000-2. But the Bush administration wanted to limit the recession so they urged Greenspan to juice up the money supply again, and he did. But this merely creates another, bigger bubble. When the real estate bubble burst we've gotten an even bigger bubble. Now Bernanke and Obama are pushing for an even bigger monetary stimulus which seems to be re-igniting the discredited derivatives market. We're probably headed for an even bigger bubble and an even bigger crash.

Your 'theory' doesn't begin to explain why a bubble occurs. It only explains where it might occur.

You accuse libertarians of having an unmitigated faith in their ideology, but the ideology itself is grounded in hard economic realities. Those realities assume a free market, private property, and the enforcement of contracts. A free market may rest to a large extent on the principle of laissez-faire, but private property and the enforcement of contracts are a matter of law.

Private property law and the enforcement of inviolable contracts are essential to the proper functioning of the economy.

Inflation violates contracts. If a lender is going to be paid back in cheaper dollars than he lent, he is being cheated. And he is being cheated by the government. This is disruptive to the economy, and it leads the government to intervene even more in an effort to cure problems of which it is the cause.

But you offer us no such hard-nosed analysis. You tell us that government regulation is good no matter what. You offer us an unmitigated faith that the government will not only make the right decision, but that it's decisions will always be good no matter how much conditions may have changed since the regulation was imposed.

Compared to your faith, a born-again Christian is involved in critical thinking.

Frankly, you offer us nothing but rhetoric. You offer us no logic and few facts and nowhere do we have a coherent combination of the two. Nowhere have you even attempted to show how the de-regulation of financial services caused the dot.com bubble. You have made a dogmatic assertion based on an article of faith.

And then you ceaselessly brag about it! What a joke! Learn something about this subject instead of burdening us with your superficialities.

[Shedinja5000]

Originally Posted by boneyard bill

Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in economics. Do you think he supported these changes out of pure ideology with no ability to contemplate their economic effects?

Neoliberal economics. Basically, Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in religion.

Have you EVER, for one second, even contemplated that there might be valid reasons why the overwhelming majority of Congressmen and Senators voted for these changes and made any attempt whatsoever to find out what those reasons might have been? The Congressional hearings and debates are a matter of public record and are probably available on the internet.

Yes. It's called bribery. Financial companies gave Congress and Bill Clinton campaign donations, and they reciprocated by deregulating the financial sector.

[boneyard bill]

Originally Posted by Shedinja5000

Neoliberal economics. Basically, Phil Gramm has a Ph.D. in religion.

Yes. It's called bribery. Financial companies gave Congress and Bill Clinton campaign donations, and they reciprocated by deregulating the financial sector.

I don't deny that money plays a big part in such things, but even so, such changes have to have a justification even if it's just for show. And that justification has to have some intellectual coherence. It has to be addressed intelligently, not rhetorically.

I have no idea what you mean by "neoliberal" economics.

[Jimmy Higgins]

Originally Posted by ksen

What did the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act allow that wasn't allowed before that caused the dot.com and housing bubbles?

From my understanding, that bill deregulated derivatives trading, which pretty much what started to kill financial institutions.

By the way, did you know that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed 90-8 in the Senate? I didn't realize all those Democrats were actually libertarians in disguise.

It was a bipartisan fucking, but clearly Gramm, that guy who said Americans were whining about the economy, was clearly the father of the child.

[Shedinja5000]

Originally Posted by boneyard bill

I have no idea what you mean by "neoliberal" economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal_economics

Originally Posted by Article

Fiscal policy discipline;[clarification needed]
Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies"[neutrality disputed]) toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;
Tax reform – broadening the tax base[clarification needed] and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;
Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
Competitive exchange rates;
Trade liberalization – liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by law and relatively uniform tariffs;
Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;[clarification needed]
Privatization of state enterprises;
Deregulation – abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudent oversight of financial institutions; and,
Legal security for property rights.

Everything on the list is basically a long way of saying "The Invisible Hand is always right." Well, except perhaps for the second thing on the list, I suppose - though in practice that could easily mean subsidies for private health insurance and private school vouchers.

I don't deny that money plays a big part in such things, but even so, such changes have to have a justification even if it's just for show. And that justification has to have some intellectual coherence. It has to be addressed intelligently, not rhetorically.

The justification is quite simple. The Invisible Hand is always right.

Their was also some claims that other countries were surviving without Glass-Steagal or similar regulations. That argument proved to be nonsense when every country without a Glass-Steagal-esque banking regulation collapsed at roughly the same time as ours in the current global recession. Countries with tighter financial sector regulations, like Canada, did not suffer a banking system collapse. Even after the side effects of their neighbors' recessions reached them, they suffered far milder recessions - virtually all of which only started several months after ours did.

Of course, the real reason most Senators voted for it was because of bribery.