On top of this, FreddieMac has been making noises about NOT wanting to be "bailed out." Something about not wanting the additional regulations that would come with such a "bailout."

If this whole episode doesn't convince Congress that Credit Default Swaps (the reason behind this whole "bailout" talk in the first place) need to be brought under tight SEC and Fed regulation, then Congress is truly impotent.

Bruno:

Do you know what the US GDP was in 1979, when we started down your bailout road? Know what it is today? On empirical evidence alone you'd have to say it works. Of course, you're talking about ideology, not reality.

OJ,

You make a fair point, but we cannot measure what the GDP would be if we had let Chrysler die. The carcass may have provided plants and labor that could have built the "Lexus" here, or given Delorean a shot that didn't require doing a coke deal.

We cannot measure how much healthier all the airlines would be if United had been forced into bankruptcy instead of their management taking bonuses for sloughing billions off on the taxpayer for union agreements they knew they couldn't keep.

We cannot measure how many banks across the US would have healthier real estate portfolios if they didn't have to march to Fannie and Freddie's underwriting tune.

You are correct that it is ideology to a degree. There is something unseemly about bailing out rich investors and CEOs, just as there something horribly wrong with Federal legislation negating millions of mortgage contracts.

...and we haven't even yet gotten to the "moral hazard" created by all this corruption and "rent-seeking."

You keep on thinking it will all be OK, and I'll continue to fret about things. Vive le difference

OJ, correlation ain't causation.

Murtha, Byrd, have at least earmarked (pocketed0 that much over the years.

Correlation can be causation. It can't be prevention.

Japanese car manufacturers moved here.

Bruno and OJ,

Who benefited more from the biggest "ownership society" fostering act of them all: the average citizen (and not-yet-legal immigrant family), or Union Pacific Railroad and other similar corporations? After all, you can't get more "moral hazard" than the United States' "police action" of killing and exiling Native Americans. Even though Union Pacific/Great Northern/et al got the best land within 2 miles either side of their lines, they didn't pay direct costs for this police force.

Furthermore, if you were to find a way to total up all the costs that land speculators paid for abandoned 160 acre plots, and adjusted the cost to today's dollars, you'd probably find out that farming/ranching in the entire states of North and South Dakota was a net money-loser. Yes, even though the land was yours, free-of-charge, if you "proved up" the homestead for 5 years, most poor immigrants ran from those plots after experiencing the first brutal Dakota winter.

2? Try 20 or more in some areas. (True, it was a checkerboard that had weirdness like BN owning St.Helens' summit when it erupted, but even there they got a bailout in the form of the landswap that established the Nat'l Monument in the devastation zone.)

And don't forget that most of those western ski towns (Aspen, Telluride, Sun Valley, etc.) were established on mining claims that were eventually "improved" to the point where the miners could take title and then later sell them to developers. (Even as late as the '80s "improvement" meant doing about $50 worth of work on your claim every year. A great way to get a vacation campsite for almost free.)

We killed them and took the land for free and it worked out well here in NH.