Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair article discussing the origins of our current economic upheaval is available over at Alternet.

5 Disastrous Decisions That Got Us into This Economic Mess

This is really a must read. The article takes a hard poke at the free market religiosity created and championed by Friedman and his acolytes. Stiglitz ends,

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, "I have found a flaw." Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working." "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan said. The embrace by America — and much of the rest of the world — of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today.

Paul Krugman echoes the same theme in What to Do at The New York Review of Books:

…I believe that the only important structural obstacles to world prosperity are the obsolete doctrines that clutter the minds of men.