As always, TB, you manage to smugly demolish a point that none of your opponents made, and you, no doubt, are baffled that they do not scatter in confusion away from the icy correctness of your triumphant logic.

What you briefly allude to but fail to properly emphasize in your self-righteous indignation is that the historical advantages post-war America enjoyed were the result of the war and its devastation, not the ideological purity and virtue of its commercial castes. When we entered the war, the entire world was floundering through an economic crisis originating in and CREATED by America. You also conveniently fail to mention that the unprecedented post-war advantage the American economy held over the rest of the planet was allowed to eventually deteriorate under the stewardship of those same mavens of industry, primarily because of their negligence, short-sightedness and greed.

The fact that our rivals in the world today are either fascist dictatorships, post-Communist economies or highly-regulated Western Liberal democracies, all systems you view as totally dysfunctional, lead those of us who believe that Capitalism can still be made to work (for purely practical reasons, not personal, emotional or ideological ones) suspect that perhaps the problem may not be so much with our economic system as with the incompetence, arrogance, and yes, greed, of those who manage it.

I don't think American businessmen are congenitally more incompetent or avaricious than anyone else's, so the inescapable conclusion is that perhaps our system has failed to properly manage them, and has allowed them to accumulate too much power. FDR's New Deal saved Capitalism the last time it painted itself into a corner through it's own pig-headedness, perhaps the time is right in this new millennium to do it all over again.