[googlerx]

You might have a point if the only negative outcome of 2008 was that a lot of people lost homes they could never afford.

It was the banks' and regulators' responsibility to not allow bad loans to be issued and resold as mis-labeled AAA investment vehicles. That is the part that broke the global economy.

[jlcoff]

NO, it's not the job of the government to save people from shooting themselves.

[atq2119]

Mis-labeling a product is literally fraud.

Looked at from first principles, the market cannot work efficiently if people are allowed to lie. Lies create an enormous amount of waste through direct and indirect effects.

Government as the monopoly on power (and locking people up) has an important role to play in policing this.

[googlerx]

I never said or implied that it was.

But (in the US at least), it actually is the government's job to keep the economy stable in order to "insure domestic Tranquility [... and...] promote the general Welfare"