Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

I have a hard time with the whole unfettered free trade and free markets gang that populates the Republican Party. It is no problem to ignore a starving child or pay a hedge fund manager billions of dollars because they each deserve what they got. The free markets created incentives for the starving child to be born to a 15 year old crack whore and for Wesley Hoggington Bellsworth IV to join a hedge fund after a Wharton MBA.

First, I thought the analogy for the $700,000,000,000.00 bail out was like a guy who goes to the casino with $10,000.00. If he wins, he keeps the money. If he loses, the taxpayers pay him back. But it’s even worse than that. The players are on their own, but the casino gets paid back if it loses. We’re facing the largest case of welfare for the wealthy in world history.

First, let’s get a handle on the size of that seven hundred billion US dollars. What is seven hundred billion? It’s over $100 for every man, woman and child in the entire world. $100 is the annual income of billions of human, so this is not particularly trivial. Put another way, it’s a million dollars for every man, woman and child in the entire state of Vermont or Wyoming or Alaska.

More fittingly, as a tax bill, it’s $6,200 for every taxpayer in the country. Paid all at once it would be a 50% increase in the Federal Income Tax owed by each taxpayer, an estimated 113 million strong.

How can they get away with it? When foreclosures started to mount, the Right said, “Those people made poor decisions and must take the consequences” which likely include lose of home, bankruptcy and worse. When the boys and girls at the investment banks made poor decisions, they got to keep their bonuses, their jobs and their companies on the backs of the people losing their homes.

Why isn’t anyone standing up to say, “The Emperor is not only naked, he’s screwing the dog”? I’ve often wondered if a malign power had attempted seven and a half years ago to ruin America whether they could have made a worse mess than the Bush Administration. It’s hard to imagine. But just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, we go from “The economy is strong” to “The economy will die if we don’t spend almost a trillion dollars on it NOW” in less than a week.

Credibility anyone? It would be hard enough if someone had admitted things were getting a little iffy, or if they offered to accept a little regulation along with their welfare, but all the abuses of the past that were chalked up to the cost of free trade now get socialized at the first whiff of disaster.

The only good that can come of this is to discredit the idea of government as the problem and the critically flawed theory of the power and perfection of an utterly free market.