The big thing politicians did to cause the current economic mess was repeal post-Depression laws keeping banks from investing in things like hedge funds and "mortgage backed investment instruments." That was in the Clinton administration, although some senators from both parties pushed it through.

That's one reason so many banks were poised to go glands up. They invested in these high-risk areas that depended on the price of housing going up and up. That's the bubble, and eventually it burst.
Fannie and Freddie were part of it -- Congress allowed them to accept variable rate subprime loans as part of their mandate to offer loans to low income folks. But people who couldn't afford mortgages got them all over the place to keep that bubble floating. Regulators weren't regulating, companies like Moody's and Standard and Poor were giving AAA ratings to investment instruments the like of which they had never seen before -- no one was doing their job.

If there had been no bailouts of banks, AIG, the car companies, etc., we would have been in a Depression that makes this look like happy days are here again. The stimulus wasted way too much money on stuff that didn't create jobs and wasn't nearly big enough to do what it was intended to do anyway.

The Constitution does allow people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But that's a philosophy, not a policy. In the original Constitution, white male property owners could vote, for example. That's a policy. Then people used the political process in the Constitution to amend that policy.

People who want to reverse some of the policy changes the Constitution has seen are just exercising their rights to do so. But that doesn't mean people who disagree with them are unpatriotic or something.

How do you keep corporations from exporting jobs without big government being involved?