Clearly, we’ve quite literally borrowed our prosperity, both on an individual level and a national level.

You are dead on in pointing out the fundamental difference between bailing out Wall Street and GM: one is the creditor, one is the credit-addict.

I would go further to suggest that Wall Street is what kept GM from failing decades ago. Perhaps Wall Street loans are not all that different from government bailouts after all, at least not to GM. For Washington this might have been something new, but perhaps for GM it was just business as usual.

Was GM no less subprime than home owners who borrowed beyond their means? If so, how many other industries or companies walked the same road? More poignantly, have we emerged from the American Century not only as the sole superpower, but also a subprime nation in disguise? When the American economy looks itself in the mirror, does it see GM? How about that family with the foreclosed home?

These are scary thoughts, and I’m not sure what to make of them. Nevertheless I just finished a blog post about this.. I would be honored by any insights!!

When you are pushing the envelope in your work you need to be constantly looking over your own shoulder, recognizing what did not work in the recent past and tweaking todays work to avoid making the same mistake.

What the worthies on Wall St and the banking industry were doing was justifying their own excessive risk by noting that everyone else was doing it. “These mortgage backed securities don’t make a lot of sense to me, but Moe & Curly seem to think they’re a great idea.”

You are not likely to learn anything from mistakes made by emulating Moe & Curly.

But the ability to buy and sell them does not equal the ability to understand them. Therein created some of the financial crisis.

Regulate it. All of it.

Seriously, there was an incredible amount of innovation on Wall Street: options, derivatives, credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, etc. Like nuclear weapons, once they were out of the hands of the inventors, wielded by people who perhaps didn’t fully understand their power, THAT’S when the trouble started.

And like nuclear weapons, perhaps it is better for us all to ban these inventions. Obama seems to want to ban nukes… but I haven’t heard anything about getting rid of credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities.

Fundamentally, we’re not talking about a creative industry. Moving wealth around is not creating wealth. Wealth creation comes from innovation in making better things. It comes from engineers, scientists, artists and designers and not the inept class of managers and financiers who find themselves in the fortuitous situation of farming the rest of us who are the true talent. The true talent goes largely uncompensated.

For the creative class, our greatest strategic goal is to find someone to work for who is smart enough to not interfer too much in what we do.