We'll give you a 2% discount on that $23,000 bill if we get a check within ten days....

The US Government has become the nation's largest mortgage lender and the nation's largest insurance company.

This, as my blogging colleagues at Delawareliberal point out, is the process of privatizing gain and socializing loss.

My friend Brian Miller has toted up the cost of just the last week's bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG:

By my calculation, the government has added $3 trillion to the national debt in the nationalization/bailouts of Fannie, Freddie, Bear, and AIG just in the last 10 days. That's about $23,000 for every tax return in the United States....

$23,000. $23,000. $23,000.

I can't get my mind around that. In the course of two weeks my government has just sucked the cost of a new car, or a year's college tuition for one of my children, or .... Well, you can fill in the blanks.

$23,000. If the government taking over these giants is such sound policy, how come the markets keep tumbling?

$23,000. And I'm supposed to trust Senator Barack Obama, who has been the second largest recipient of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae political contributions in the last ten years, to clean up this mess? Yep. Right.

$23,000. Who said they were too large to fail? And why?

$23,000.

$23,000.

When are American voters going to wake up to the fact that all we have done here is to transfer liability from those who took unreasonable risks to those who didn't?

Answer: apparently never.

Comments

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here: chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.” The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...

Search This Blog