Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Yuval on the Bailout

As it now reads, the scheme gives way too much discretion to the Secretary of the Treasury for two whole years. The need to check such unprecedented power points to the continuing need for divided government and to a man honorable enough to say that government can’t possibly buy us out of all our pain.

Discussions - 6 Comments

So one way of putting it, picking up where we left off on the Lasch thread, is that a true economic populism has to assuage our anxiety realistically without devolving into a feel good therapeutic narcissism. That's a message Obama simply can't deliver and that Biden will only deliver in the clumsiest fashion (it's patriotic to pay higher taxes)...McCain has to establish that he's the bearer of an honest realism that treats us like adults who can understand what ails us and brace ourselves for the cure.


Where was this caution against concentrated power when Congress was granting Bush his war resolution? If the government cannot buy us out of our economic fears, then neither can it fight us out of our terror fears. The critical mind then moves to the next logical step - who benefits from all of this fear? When power concentrates out of fear, tyranny reigns. Just put Rumsfeld in charge of the treasury and call his program one of Economic counter-proliferation.

1. If you read DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, its pretty clear that Obama is a corporatist who believes in Big Business/Big Government alliances to carry on vague political social goals. He would probably be the type to buy alot of economic incomeptence and politcal corruption with that 700 billion.

2.McCain might be a better guy to trust with all that money (who wouldn't? Maybe Chris Dodd)but McCain has shown little real understanding or even real populism when it come to this crisis. His main theme is that the election of a leader who demands more regulation and who hires more virtuous regulaters will get us out of this mess. Thats actually anti populist. The kicker is that these new virtuous regulaters will include Andrew Cuomo. Was Eliot Spitzer too busy?

3. Its important that McCain not overpromise that any bailout will magically erase the consequences of years of bad decisions by government, corporations and individuals. But McCain has to be able to offer more than honest pain. He needs to show how his agenda will allow for upward mobility if people really show the talents and virtues that McCain knows they have.

It seems to me that we are treating the symptoms. To read these articles we would believe that they were giving home loans to vagrants on the streets. Why are all these people defaulting? Its because of the outsourcing problem people. I know we all like to say free trade and what not but is it really free trade when we do bussiness with a communist dictatorship??? Is is ethical to do business the way we do with China, and then turn around and say we must spread democracy. The banks did not issue loans to people without jobs. The people lost the decent paying blue collar jobs and then defaulted. Couple that with curious gas related price increasing and that is the heart of it. Why we call out this risky lending without asking why all the risk failed is a failure of people to not swallow the swill that comes out of Washington and the media.

Is it ethical to entrust private, de-regulated businesses with the power to cripple our economy?

Why shouldn't we call this bailout what it is--market-socialism?

The Democratic Party supports it. The Republican Party supports it. The only party opposing it is the Libertarian Party.

By supporting the bailout, doesn't McCain show clearly that he is a market-socialist?

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