Free Liberal

Coordinating towards higher values

Reacting to the Bailout

by Carl Milsted, Jr.

Robert Capozzi suggests free liberals should have had a rational plan to ease out of this credit crunch. Maybe so, if we had some people in Congress and millions of dollars to promote our ideas. Given the speed of the crisis, and the fact that the groundwork was lain years ago, the traditional libertarian approach of griping and neener dancing is perhaps appropriate.

To this end, I have put together a mean-spirited photo essay mocking Wall Street millionaires asking for government largesse.

Enjoy.

And then we can get back to the less fun work of coming up with constructive near term solutions in those areas where we theoretically have time to act.


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Comments

yes, Carl, marshalling a counter in such a short timeframe was daunting, perhaps impossible.

maybe next "crisis...."

# posted at by Robert Capozzi

The photos look like stills from an alternate-universe "Subterranean Homesick Blues" video.

What I tell my "liberal" friends:


Faith in regulation says more about the political brain, people overly fond of power, than it does about methods to keep money safe. Keilor even writes that the money was ours. So, we shove all our money over to people we vilify up one side and down the other, and expect regulation to save us? Politics never did have much room for rationality.


The obvious solution -- don't give them all your money in the first place. To redirect all we spend on land and buildings, we need to shift taxes and subsidies, and thereby redirect all that spending to ourselves. Use taxes or fees to recover the values of land and resources and use a dividend to share the revenue among us, a la Alaska's oil dividend. That'd shrink mortgages down to the size of the value of the building, something local credit unions could comfortably manage, an no longer the low-hanging fruit for the rapacious.


Lose the ambition of trying to lord it over Wall Street. Just don't send them your money.