There is the possibility, even the likelihood, of self-approving and extravagantly error-prone behavior on the part of those closely associated with … - John Kenneth Galbraith

In accordance with an old but not outworn tradition, it might now be wise for all to conclude that crime, or even misbehavior, is the act of an individual, not the predisposition of a class.

No feature of American—to some extent of Anglo-Saxon—politics is so certain as the tendency of politicians to become first the captives, then the agents, of their opposition. ...In the 1960s, liberal Democrats... urged peace and international amity but continued the Cold War and plunged the country into Vietnam. ...partly because they feared being called appeasers and crypto-Communists by the right. Richard Nixon, having impeccable credentials as a Cold Warrior, moved towards peace or accommodation with Moscow and Peking and withdrew... from Vietnam. Thus on foreign policy he outflanked his liberal opposition. When Professor Milton Friedman proposed a guaranteed income for the poor, it was considered (quite correctly) an act of creative imagination. When a Republican administration proposed it to Congress, it was a mark of conservative statemanship. When George McGovern, running for President, advanced a close variant... it was condemned by conservatives as the dream of a fiscal maniac. As known and stalwart defenders of the dollar, the Republicans were able, in the early 1970s, to devalue it... twice. For anyone suspected of a more flexible attitude towards the integrity of the dollar, such action would have been exceedingly perilous.

There was something superficial in attributing anything so awful as the Great Depression to anything so insubstantial as speculation in common stocks.