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

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?

New Warfare: I started my posts with a discussion.....

.....on Unrestricted warfare . The US Air force Institute for National Security Studies have developed a reasonable systems approach to deter non-state violent actors who they label as NSVA's. It is an exceptionally important report if we want to deter violent extremism and other potential violent actors that could threaten this nation and its security. It is THE report our political officials should be listening to to shape policy so that we do not become excessive in using force against those who do not agree with policy and dispute it with reason and normal non-violent civil disobedience. This report, should be carefully read by everyone really concerned with protecting civil liberties while deterring violent terrorism and I recommend if you are a professional you send your recommendations via e-mail at the link above so that either 1.) additional safeguards to civil liberties are included, or 2.) additional viable strategies can be used. Finally, one can only hope that politici

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