I'm actually all in favor of freeing the entrepreneurial spirit - but it turns out, interestingly, that you actually need very strict regulations to free the entrepreneurial spirit.
Charles FergusonWhen the U.S. government is serious about doing something that's complicated and difficult, it can do it.
Charles FergusonIt is much simpler and easier to collect and caress the trophies of our democratic inheritance than it is to fashion up-to-date tools with which to work on our current problems.
Charles FergusonThus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartelโan arrangement I have termed Americaโs political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.
Charles FergusonThe real challenge is figuring out how the United States can regain control of its future from its new oligarchy and restore its position as a prosperous, fair, well-educated nation. For if we don't, the current pattern of great concentration of wealth and power will worsen, and we may face the steady immiseration of most of the American population.
Charles FergusonA very high fraction of America's economic problems come not from our difficulties with education or globalization or competition with the Chinese or whatever. But they come from the fact that a small number of wealthy and powerful people who run dangerous and/or inefficient companies are able, through the use of money in the political process, to prevent the government from regulating them properly.
Charles Ferguson