What exactly killed the economy?

Well? 

OBAMA: the economy has tanked because of a lack of a proper financial regulation framework. Bush and Co stripped the market of essential regulations in the 2000's, and everything spilled over into a chaotic unsustainable lending crisis. I heard something on NPR about the lifting of rules against depository banks (i.e., the ones typical Americans use to hold their checking accounts) operating in the securities markets; probably a part of the deregulation puzzle. Obama also vaguely states that we have a 20th Century regulatory framework for a 21st Century financial market. What this means beyond re-instituting the pre-Bush financial controls, I don't know.

McCAIN: the "greed and corruption on Wall Street" caused this mess. OK, I understand that this is just a sort of an obscure way of also saying regulation is needed, but he obviously used this form to obfuscate any connection between the deregulation he and Bush supported in the past few years. More importantly, it is just a stupid statement. Of course there is greed on Wall Street. It is fucking Wall Street for Christ's sake. Corruption? I guess if you mean the whole golden parachute thing, but these guys were given these golden parachutes by their board of directors or whomever. And even if the board was in cahoots with these CEOs, the god damn stockholders should have given them the boot if they deemed it so inappropriate -- am I to believe that they couldn't find their officers compensation packages? Corporate structure might mean that there is less need to monitor, but it doesn't mean that stockholders should cease monitoring their companies altogether. I agree that there are places where the market fails, but it doesn't strike me that CEO compensation packages is one of them.

Ron Paul: the government killed it. The crux of his argument is that the Federal Reserve (Fed) manipulates interest rates below what the market should be able to sustain:

When interest rates are lowered to below what the market rate would normally be, as the Federal Reserve has done numerous times throughout this decade, it becomes much cheaper to borrow money. Longer-term and more capital-intensive projects, projects that would be unprofitable at a high interest rate, suddenly become profitable.

Because the boom comes about from an increase in the supply of money and not from demand from consumers, the result is malinvestment, a misallocation of resources into sectors in which there is insufficient demand.

I know Ron Paul is supposed to be this character on the fringe, but his explanation makes so much more sense to me than either of the candidates. Obama just vaguely talks about regulations and the market having been let "run wild." McCain talks about greed, corruption, golden parachutes.

OK, look, this obviously hinges on your political ideology. And while I might not agree with Obama that regulation is always the answer, I do expect more from him to convince me that he is right (I get the feeling that it's just too damn easy for him to ride in to the presidency on the wave of sewage created by the Bushites). As for McCain...  I can't take his arguments seriously in this form, and nor should anyone. 

I don't have an expert's grasp on economics, but the simplicity, poignancy and transparency of Ron Paul's stance on the economy are hard to set aside. So what next? Do we grab our sledgehammers and head over to the Federal Reserve, smashing through block-by-block in a photo-friendly revolution?

Probably not. My feeling is that the size of the federal government is simply to large to have an unregulated, decentralized financial market. If we take Paul's free-market economics to heart, then we shouldn't care about market crashes -- they are simply correcting measures. But a machine the size of the government probably can't feed itself with that kind of instability. Regulations are here to stay as long as the government is this big. But it is some guidance when thinking where we should take the future.