I suppose some people think...

...I quote Paul Krugman too much, but I just think he's been so right throughout this whole financial crisis. (I guess my reading is somewhat Darwinian: the more someone is right, the more I read them; the more they're wrong, the more I tend to skip over them. And Krugman has been spot-on.) 

Anyway, this paragraph from Krugman's column this morning hit close to home:

The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.

Back in the 1980s and '90s, I was a believer in the power of markets. The markets, to me, were like a thermometer: you may not like what they were telling you, but they couldn't be wrong.

In fact, when in doubt, it was always a good practice to refer back to Rule # 1: The market is always right. (This was reinforced by working in the futures markets by day and attending B school at night; Kellogg professors were big believers in the efficient market hypothesis.)

So I was a True Believer. I believed in free markets, free trade, low taxes, low spending, smaller government, and privatize everything -- the whole shebang. (I was even a member of the Libertarian Party for a few years.)

But ... slowly, almost imperceptibly ... my views evolved. And then the financial crisis hit and the banks and auto companies had to be bailed out. I came to realize, gradually, that the last thirty years in this country had produced a yawning inequality in wealth (just like the Gilded Ages of the 1890s and 1920s), the obliteration of the manufacturing sector (was that nut case Ross Perot right, after all?), the decline of unions and the raping of the middle class.

Corporate profits and the stock market soared, the rich got fabulously richer, and blue collar jobs were sent overseas. 

It makes me wonder if the United States is turning, slowly, into a Latin American-style banana republic -- one or two percent of the population controlling the vast majority of the nation's wealth while the rest are left to rot.

So I wonder: were we wrong? Did Ronald Reagan usher in an era that ended up doing more harm than good? Are these Occupy Wall Street people on to something? Is the government controlled by, and for, the richest one percent?

(I think the tea party movement was correct initially: TARP, though necessary, was crony capitalism at its very worst -- we bailed out the nation's largest banks without any strings attached. Then we watched as the real economy cratered while Wall Street bankers paid themselves huge bonuses and large corporations booked record profits. Main Street, meanwhile, went to hell.

The mistake came when the tea partiers put the blame on all of government. It was then just a short step for people like Dick Armey and Fox News to distract the movement with fear of that black guy in the White House and his socialist health care scheme -- borrowed from the Republicans -- which the tea party should have embraced.)

Now the tea party is fading and the OWS movement is rising. Could the United States be in the early days of a new Progressive Era?