The future generations will look in the history books at "societies that were greedy" and instead of advancing technology and efficiency, they stifled and discouraged it because it went against established corporate profit motives.

This is about greed, and you're right in saying that government programs have caused this. The greed takes over your logic and diligent decision-making, and we end up trying to make a lot of money on things that are nothing more than speculative.

And so now look at what we're doing from 40,000 feet: we're trying to instill confidence by TAXING firefighters and school teachers all over the country? Are we actually creating value? Are corporate profits going up because value has been created in the market? Is there anything really coming out of this? Is this a reason to be more confident? Is there an economical justification for "bailing out" these firms that have made poor investment decisions? Are the toxic mortgages going to magically "pay for themselves" after all of this money gets circulated?

What really have we solved from any of this?