Perhaps this is too radical to even be spoken aloud, but the idea keeps coming into my radical leftist head. Private banks loan us, the people, money with interest fleecing us of our own wealth. Our reward is that we are able to have credit. When their lending practices fail we bail them out so that some of our own wealth can "trickle" down to us.
Meanwhile there is zero accountability because the same people that made poor decisions with their own money will now be trusted to make good decisions with "our" money (technically the money they lost was ours to begin with but I digress).
Since a 700 billion dollar bailout is socialism anyway why not take it one step further and purchase the lending institutions ourselves? Why can't the government lend money? With the interest the government collects we can spend that wealth on health care, education, infrastructure instead of private jets and large house the bankers spend our wealth on.
What is the argument against this efficiency? Instability? Look at the markets today, look at the mortgage crisis, and the economy. Private banks hasn't shielded the country from our current crisis it's created the problem.
As to socialism look what is is happening today. Citigroup has bought Wachovia. We are creating, slowly, one large bank. A private bank through whom all the interest of all the loans in the country will flow. Whether by chance or design this is what's happening. And if that bank ever is threatened the people must rescue the bank to avoid disaster.
Why can't we have one large federal bank instead? Instead of praying that the private banks are generous enough to share some of our own money with us we can control our own fate.
I'd love to hear some arguments against this idea. If there are some logical arguments I'm missing I'd love to learn. And if people want to flame me that's fine too.