>kirsten asks:
>
> >[and a major argument against "socialized" medicine is quality of care?
> >what could be scarier than this example of free market medicine?]
>
>How about this...
>
>Today's Lesson From The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
>
>by Robert L. Prechter
Ah yes, Robert Prechter, of Gainesville, Ga., the "broiler capital of the world." He got famous in the 1980s using the Elliott Wave technique, a discipline developed by a retired accountant that purports to read patterns in market movements. Up moves break into five alternating up & down waves - 3 ups, broken by two downs, with the middle up move the grandest of the lot. The periodicity of these moves range from moments to centuries, each wave decomposable into smaller waves of similar structure. Prechter said that the bull market of the 1980s was the fifth (and final) upwave of a Grand Supercycle wave for the U.S. that began in 1789; after the market peaked at Dow 3686 (he's got a Fibonacci technique for picking magic numbers) all hell was to break loose, as the Dow revisited 1932's lows and the U.S. experienced comprehensive breakdown.
His other efforts in tying pop culture to the stock market include an argument that "girl groups" are popular in corrective phases and late 1970s/early 1980s punk rock was, like nihilism, the product of a bear market.
Doug