Bail Out

Like everyone I know, I am quite disturbed by the apparent crisis in the global financial markets. I’m not smart enough to forecast how bad it might become. I worry about what impact it will have on me and my family’s future, on our ability to viably sustain our style of life and well being.

But I am smart enough to know that our politicians and their appointed bureaucrats - every single, last, self-serving, opportunistic, feckless, incompetent, unethical, untruthful, vengeful, cowardly one of them - share direct responsibility for this frightening state of affairs, along with whoever are the corporate crooks on Wall Street.

And I positively cringe at the idea of a federal bail-out. It is destructive to the Constitutional framework and role of our federal government. It is anathema to the eyes-wide-open, risk-reward equation inherent in a capitalist economic system. It is an insult to and a deprivation of every honest wage-earning, debt-paying, tax-beleaguered citizen.

Beyond all else, the bail-outs so far proposed seem to have potential consequences no less grave than the perceived immediate crisis. As solutions, they are purely speculative. Whether or not they would re-instill confidence in financial markets is anyone’s guess. Even if they do so, it’s as likely as not to be a benefit of short duration; in return for what would certainly amount to a very high, long term social and economic penalty. In other words, it leads us to a future of instability and the insecurity that attends it, only more gradually. There seems to be no rock-bottom to these proposals, presenting us with an action whose ultimate costs we cannot know. Even if bottom can be plausibly measured, whether such a bail-out would be a one-time, rock-bottom event or merely the first dislodged boulder that triggers a cascading rockslide of socialist policy and practice, it will utterly disfigure the form and function of our Constitutional republic.

The risk of personal failure that predictably leads to personal loss is precisely what disciplines personal decisions. If at this crucial time we find ourselves disappointed, even downright outraged, that lack of disciplined decisions in the marketplace and in Washington have led us to this juncture, how does the forgiveness of a bail-out make our future more secure? How does evasion of responsibility for failure work to make future decisions wiser?

Adding further insult to injury, we are left with the inescapable expectation that the very fools who wouldn’t see this coming until it hit them in the face, some of whom actively even if unwittingly participated in its conception, must necessarily be the same fools who plan to deliver us from its consequences.

I’m afraid there isn’t a leader of either party, in Congress or the Administration, who instills any confidence in me. There isn’t one of them whose words or motives I trust. I am, therefore, truly at a loss; a loss beyond financial. I weep for the nation that I love so dearly.

- Centurion