I've addressed all your points previously, but I'll take another shot at summarizing it.

You keep calling "socialized capital" my idea, but as I said when I brought it up, it's something that I stumbled upon while researching Libertarian beliefs. I doubt that the idea came from your branch of Libertarianism, but to call it a Liberal idea is completely off base.

It's not inconsistent with Libertarian beliefs (as part of the larger category of "individualist anarchism") because its goal is to equalize the starting conditions. It says nothing about the outcome.

Earlier I mentioned folding the SBA into the Federal Reserve to administer a program of easy capital. To address your concern about the basis of funding decisions, you have to look only at the precedent of the SBA, which has been making business funding decisions for a long time. The process seems to be relatively free of corruption because it's possible to judge a business plan objectively using well-known analytical tools.

If the program gets a lot larger then of course there will be more motivation to corrupt it. But the nature of the program itself makes it relatively resistant to corruption, because the idea is to spread capital, and its resultant power, widely throughout the population. The ability of business to improperly influence the government is based on both the amount of money each business has and the number of competitors trying to corrupt the government their own way. With a relatively small number of very large players, the competition doesn't cancel out as reliably, there's more scope for collusion, and the individual players each have more power. Change that equation by fostering a larger number of smaller businesses, and you reduce the scope for corruption of the government.

In other words, "socializing capital" in fact fosters more competition in the both commercial and political marketplaces. When did you stop believing that competition's a good thing?

Your equation of government corruption has two terms, both of which influence the amount of resulting corruption. Your ideology compels you to focus on only the government half, but I see the private side of the equation as being just as amenable to reform because it makes an equal contribution to the problem.

Your comments about the ATM stickup show that you're only looking at where the capital would come from for this plan: Taxpayers. But perhaps you're not thinking it through to its logical conclusion. The business of capital is to make a profit and then to create an upward spiral of profit through reinvestment. Assuming that over the long haul the SuperSBA's decisions are, on average, good ones, then the program should turn a profit through interest on loan repayment. Puts me in mind of the Republican chestnut that the government ought to be run like a business. OK, here's an example of doing just that. The program's initial capitalization of something like $100 billion would, in a few years time, become a self-sustaining profit center for the government.

Like I said at one point, wouldn't it be just too cool for words to receive a dividend from the government instead of paying it taxes?

BTW, notice that I'm looking at it as the making of loans rather than equity investment. Letting the government be a significant shareholder in businesses seems like a really bad idea, and flirts dangerously close to fascism. Better if the government sticks with the relatively safe world of lending than accept the risks and conflicts-of-interest implicit in equity investment.

Come to think of it, the government sitting on the board of directors of so many companies would be a blatant violation of its own antitrust laws. What a nightmare scenario that would be, eh?

Bottom line, it's my view that we share similar goals. It's just that I'm advocating unfamiliar ways to achieve those goals that's throwing you. I value individual liberty and want more of it, and as I've said many times, I'd welcome a free market in America; but I don't think it's possible to get there simply by turning back the clock to a fictional golden age. I think we can get there only by moving forward.

I guess that's the difference between a progressive and a conversative within the broader Western Liberal tradition--posigrade versus retrograde change. But please don't let the disagreement about means lead you to believe that we disagree on the ends.