Web Letters: The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation

Morgenson is right to be concerned about corruption of capitalism today. The last time we had crony capitalism of the sort we have now, we had a stagnant economy and RICO statutes were finally introduced to punish and weed out the widespread corruption siphoning off resources at every level of our economy.

Today, despite decades of positive efforts to deregulate and introduce real competition, which worked for a time, and indoctrination of the best and brightest into Hayek and Ayn Rand, we are back to a Big Man economy.

This Big Man economy thinks nothing of putting its brainpower to gaming our democratic institutions instead of new business, despite the obvious violations of true competitive markets that results from these games.

Their paid-for Congressmen pay manipulative lip service to "free-markets," by which they definitely do not mean "open and competitive markets," for the benefit of the voters, who don't know the difference.

Ms. Morgenson is onto these problems, and she is right. I spend a lot of time polling Gen Y's for work, and they don't know the difference either. Today, they are siding more and more with "socialism," since they see parents, grandparents and friends getting wiped out by what they think is capitalism. They do represent 100M future voters, so this will be tricky in a few years.

I hope they do learn the difference between "democratic socialism" and "totalitarian socialism," because here we've forgotten such distinctions for capitalism. Just like in totalitarian socialism, we've handed the whole place over to a select few who secretly rule Washington with an iron hand and their unlimited political money! They even get away with breathlessly telling Congress that without $Bs in bail-out money, the whole world will disintegrate!

When Ms Morgenson's work finally shows the difference between that and truly "democratic capitalism," she may be somewhere toward achieving her goal! Better do so before 100M Gen Ys turn 18!

Brett Barndt

Johnstown, PA