…why isn’t Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, challenged on his slow response to the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failures? The only serious critic I’ve found was interviewed in France’s Le Monde: Columbia finance Prof. Rama Cont argues that six months ago the bailout of the two mortgage agencies would have cost $100 billion instead of an eventual $400 billion to $500 billion. Who pocketed the difference, thanks to Paulson’s “indulgence” of his former colleagues? According to Cont, it was short sellers at Goldman Sachs and hedge funds. Meanwhile, where are the deep thinkers who might enlighten us in this hour of fear, including Karl Marx? Don’t laugh. Marx had much to say about the so-called “contradictions of capitalism” that bears re-reading today. Nothing he wrote is perfectly applicable to subprime mortgages and the derivatives crapshoot. But Marx’s understanding that unfettered capitalism, while fantastically productive, leads to instability by concentrating wealth in too few hands — that a mass-production/mass-consumption society is fundamentally incompatible with oligarchic control of wealth — is something even Rush Limbaugh could appreciate.