The difference in your critique and Jake's is all-important; numerous contributors here recognize that  "the whole system was [is] a precarious, morally absurd, mess."  But they don't, for all that, simply dismiss out of hand everything in it without distinction.

    My favorite example of your myopia is how you take Paul Krugman to task (and you don't hesitate to restate his positions in a flagrantly unfair way.)

  Whatever Krugman's faults, he's not only done more to redress the incredible general ignorance of basic economic concepts than practically any other U.S. figure, he's done it with extremely few fellow-writer/journalists to help him.  There should be hundreds like him--since, after all, he presents what are generally the standard accepted views among respectable economists on basic issues; but there aren't, at least in the pages of the daily mainstream press.  Joseph Stiglitz, who also writes columns and books, is the most notable example of "help" in this effort.  But before Krugman began a patient effort to correct what amounts to monumental public ignorance in economics--he did Noble-worthy work just raising the level of attention to economic issues at all--the situation resembled a general public which existed in a vast darkness, having simply no idea beyond simple fairy-tales they'd been fed in junior high and high school.

    You denigrate all of that effort by Krugman without the slightest distinction.  Despite the fact that today, because of Krugman's decade of columns, many more Americans have a deal more than sheer ignorance or simplistic fairy-tales on which to reason in economic issues.

     Krugman does absolutely essential work in offering the non-specialist public a comprehensible interpretation of contemporary economic controversies and you give him zero credit, zero credit.

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge