By Brian Greenspun

Sun, Oct 5, 2008 (2 a.m.)

The United States lives at the intersection of Main and Wall.

These past two weeks have brought into sharp focus the inherent conflicts of the United States’ political system — democracy — and economic system — capitalism. If you don’t believe me, just look and listen.

Look at the e-mail being read on the cable talk shows that still shows an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the $700 billion — or is it $840 billion? — bailout of Wall Street. People are still hopping mad that their tax dollars are being handed over to Wall Street bankers.

And listen to the politicians who, even after the bill has passed, are still trying to cover their votes — they must keep them in their back pockets, delayed reaction to come — by speechifying about the need to protect the working men and women of this country and the folks whose American dreams were being threatened by a credit crunch the likes of which we haven’t seen since sometime in 1929.

What most of this ill-informed reaction signifies to me — besides the highly deserved emotional response to having to pay close to a trillion dollars to fix a problem that shouldn’t have happened — is that people are happiest when they are ignorant.

No one is ever happy placing the blame where it belongs because that usually involves a mea culpa or two. No, it is far easier to blame the other guy because that is not only what is expected in this country, it is also what is accepted.

We have grown into a culture in which politics works better for approximately half of this country when we blame the other half for our troubles. It doesn’t matter which half because that changes with the subject at hand.

In this case, it is the Republicans’ fault because they have purposefully turned a blind eye and ear to the excesses of the capitalistic system. They have, as a result of some religious belief in the purity of the markets, allowed the inevitability of the “profits of greed” to overwhelm the financial infrastructure and shut down the credit system upon which our country rests.

Simply put, one political party has been screaming about overregulation for so long that the people bought the concept, right down to the idea of basically no regulation at all. The result is that greed overcame common sense, and now look at the fine mess we have gotten ourselves into. To be somewhat fair, the public was ready for the anti-regulation argument because for too long, the government got excited about regulating our business culture to the point of stifling innovation and entrepreneurship.

But, as it has been with most things we do in America, we swung the pendulum not from one extreme to the middle, but from the far end of one side all the way to the far end of the other. We seem never to learn the valuable lesson of moderation.

I realize it makes some sense a few weeks from a presidential election to seek some political advantage by trying to explain the bailout vote — even to the point of not using the word “bailout” — but the fact remains that something had to be done to unclog the credit pipeline. Were there other plans that may have worked just as well or better? Perhaps and probably. But, at some point, we have to rely on the experts we hire to tell us what is best.

The secretary of the Treasury and the chairman of the Federal Reserve seem to me to be far better economic advisers than any of the 535 members of Congress, most of whom are more like you and me, except that we elected them to the House and Senate because they are supposed to be smarter and more knowledgeable than us.

At some point we are supposed to trust people who know more, think about these things more often and make it their job to learn more about these matters than we do. We have our lives and our jobs and they have theirs.

And it is this understanding that gets us to the corner of Main and Wall. Streets, that is.

The crisis we are in is not just a product of excess on Wall Street. It is also the result of the loss of common sense on Main Street, peppered with a coat of greed.

How often do you hear people at work or at home tell you that they don’t mind if the government raises taxes — as long as it is the other guy’s? That is both a recognition that there is a need to fill and a belief that it is someone else’s responsibility to do it. That is blatantly un-American and, yet, it seems to be where we have allowed ourselves to live over a number of years.

By the same token, when someone hands us something for nothing — such as a mortgage we can’t believe for a home we can’t afford — we can’t grab it fast enough. And, then, when the inevitable happens — the bottom falls out and we are flat up against it — we are quick to blame others. In this case, the others are the bankers on Wall Street who dreamed up these nutty loans. But the truth is that if we weren’t so greedy, if we thought for a moment before we wolfed down the “free lunch” we were being offered, none of this would have happened.

Our government works when there is a proper balance between the operation of our financial system and the needs of our citizens. That’s why we have politicians — to balance the wants and needs and make sure neither gets out of whack.

When the politicians, in order to placate the voters, turn their backs on the kind of regulation and oversight that is required to keep the markets away from the excessive, the system breaks down. And it does so right on the corner of Wall Street and Main Street.

The point is simple. There is no them and us in this deal. The enemy is greed, theirs and ours. We have now met that enemy.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.