Is the US headed towards a socialist government?

[eppie]

I'm not saying that businesses are infallible, but as a whole, the aggregate of allowing market forces to determine the course of the river will be a better result than getting out the government bulldozers and digging a channel for the economy.

I don't agree. First because in most western countries the real personal risk of a business owner is 0. Business goes bad? File for bankrupcy and start again. On average a government will know better what is good for it's people (as long as it doesn't make decissions based on what industry lobby groops tell to do).
The next argument is that it is very easy to make money on useless things (so not things as bread, houses, water, cloths). And I think that once you have a crisis as big as this one, and the government will have to pay, better to let the government decide what to do (as you said the most important thing is that people get jobs, and thus money to spend, thus stimulating the economy) even though something might be useless, at least you don't let some business owner profit from it in an unfair way.

And, some things might seem useless to you, but I think not being able to get a private party to step in and seeing a profit and being useless are two different things. I wonder if we would have GPS satellites if a private company needed to pay the whole track.