Now Is Not The Time For Profit, Its Time To Spend

Matt Welch at Hit and Run writes about the bailout of the banks. He has a good summation paragraph on how it's going down:

As President Obama said,

There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for
them to get bonuses--now is not that time.

It will likely never be that time, as long as the government is in the
business of running private commerce. Banks will be forced to write 4 percent
mortgages. Automakers will be forced to build magical green cars that spew out 3
million jobs from their exhaust pipes. Airlines will be forced to Buy American,
governors will be forced to spend their budget-filling bounty on unionized
teachers, and newspapers will be forced to run Rahm Emanuel columns. Local
commercial decisions will be made in Washington, based on politics, instead of
by business-owners, based on consumers. As a direct result, the once-autonomous
firms, despite all that fancy money, will get less and less competitive, spend
more and more of their time trying to please Washington instead of their
customers, and will continue coming back for more as long as the well doesn't
run dry. Even if some of the details are off, the general results are as
preditable as a Beltway school closing early on a snow day. Nationalizations
have happened time and time again over recorded history, and their rate of
success is not ambiguous.

I think Nationalization is the crux of the matter. People tend to loose trust in democracy when they realize that what gets them into office (power) can also replace them. Honestly I don't think 90% of the politicians in Washington even realize that what they are doing right now is very close to what was done in the great depression, and will probably ultimately lead to the down fall of our country as we know it. I firmly believe that we are heading for a Soviet Union like crash.

4% mortgage, must be time to buy. Except wait, what happened when low interest rates go back up and the people that overextended themselves getting into the perfect house can't make the new higher interest rate payment? We would all be better off, instead of a 1-2 trillion stimulus to be spent on making sure UAW still gets paid $75/hour, if the government paid off everybodys mortgage.