Free markets are all about risk and reward. Capitalism is ordinarily the best of systems because it rewards those who make the biggest contributions to profits and growth, and punishes those who make bad decisions, or abuse the system. Not this time. Among those who have been given the biggest paychecks and the biggest perks are men who made the biggest blunders in modern banking history. Compared to them, Congress looks smart and virtuous. They have imposed a terrible burden on Bernanke—and on the most vulnerable workers across the American economy. Yes, their stockholders have suffered, but few regular readers of this publication have lost money from the collapse in those stocks. The readership self-selects: our viewpoint is so contrarian that only a small minority of investors could stand to work their way through our prose. But we are all involved in the travails of an American economy that has been pushed to the limits by the bad behavior of all those wealthy and powerful men.

That they are disgraces to capitalism is obvious. That they don’t seem to realize just how appalling their behavior has been is a sign of their moral vacuity. That they have been paid egregious sums of money and have not once offered to repay funds which were paid to them based on their misrepresentation of the actual risks they were assuming and the misstatements of real earnings of the companies they led shows why they are greater challenges to capitalism than all the socialist editorialists in the land.

As Friedman wrote: the main challenge to capitalism is capitalists; the main challenge to socialism is socialism.   Don Coxe