I'm writing this on the road from a Nashville, TN hotel room. If you didn't catch the note in my weekly Ezine, I'm on day 3 of a 9 day trip. That means my entries may interrupted a bit, so please bear with me.

Some thoughts I had while driving yesterday I want to share with you.

Three years ago, the Bush Administration (and Republicans in general) touted the value of private Social Security accounts in the personal portfolios of individual Americans. If that plan had been adopted, how much money would have been lost yesterday in the worst financial loss since 9/11? I shudder to think. The older you get, the less time you have to recover from such things.

One principal I was taught about money management is this. Your savings should be in three buckets at three levels. Level 1 is in "safe" investments such as FDIC insured bank accounts. Level 2 are in higher risk investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds) designed to fund your retirement when you no longer want to or are able to work to earn more money. Level 3 is money you are willing to risk on fun stuff that might make you money or that you simply enjoy. It seems to me that Social Security belongs in the Bucket 1 category. Yesterday would seem to be a prime example of why.

One of the lines from my book is a line I heard once from someone else. We have a free market economy fueled by greed--and that greed must be regulated.

Government should function as a referee, balancing the interests of the competing interests in our society. What some people decry as socialism is, I think, a distortion. Certainly we want to keep the competition of free markets. That competition can benefit consumers. But unregulated competition can hurt consumers, workers and business alike. How you view regulation is a function of your political philosophy.

I don't have time to fully develop this during this entry, but I'll start and perhaps finish later.

Is political philosophy a bit like the operating system on a computer? We have gone through an evolution of operating systems. First there was DOS, then there was Windows, then there was something else whose name escapes me followed by Windows XP and now there is Vista. Somewhere out there is someone who's a MAC user who can tell me about the evolution of the MAC operating system and how much more stable it is than the Windows platform.

On top of each of these operating systems are installed word processing, spread sheet, gaming and other applications. Each of those applications is only as good or as bad as the operating system allows it to be.

In the same way, political philosophies act as the operating systems for political parties. The effectiveness of a political party to govern will only be as good or as bad as their political philosophy allows them to be.

Again, this is why I say you as an individual citizen need to be focused on the development of your own political philosophy--The principles you want to see used by and the outcomes you want from government. Then you need to find the party best reflecting those values and/or be active in making a political party adapt those values. Until we collectively do those things we will lurch from crisis to crisis until we fail completely.

My thoughts for the day, for what they're worth. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.