> The real issue is the collectivist delusion that more state control is the solution
My head hurts.
> The collectivist dismissal of history as "squishy"
Firstly, I am not a collectivist. Secondly, I don't dismiss history; I think it's very important and illuminating. Thirdly, Karl Marx, the arch-collectivist, hardly dismissed history; his entire theory was based on historical analysis. History is not a list of facts; what real historians do is largely interpretation. History is almost completely unlike maths. Expressions like "history tells us that ..." are rather stultifying; history tends to tell us what we want to hear.
Your comment seems to be a catalogue of free-marketeer articles of faith, expressed as bald assertions, as if only a fool could fail to see their obvious truth. Well, we've had free-marketeers in charge here for 15 years now; everyone knows that things have got worse.