It's not history repeating itself - it's people not learning from the mistakes of the past

[nico1908]

"Maybe market meltdowns are what happen to a country when commentary on matters economic becomes the exclusive province of business thinkers. When labor unions are systematically crushed. When dissent is divorced from matters economic or social and becomes instead a quality of middle-class taste preferences, of 'extreme' cars and 'radical' packaged goods. When management theorists take it as their duty to dazzle us with a crescendo of free-market worship. When leaders of left parties cleanse their ranks of laborites, of New Dealers, of Keynesians, of socialists. When newspapers refuse to open their columns—on grounds of laughable, self-evident dinosaurdom—to doubters and second-wavers and old-school liberals.

Today we are paying for each of these, for all of the ways in which we expunged the common sense of our parents' America from our lives. With each month's nauseating returns, we are making good the intellectual folly of the last 10 years."

Sound familiar? - This is an excerpt from an article called "The Rah-Rah Boys" by Thomas Frank, published in the Los Angeles Times in 2002 (source here).