Americans better wake up.....

[Tim Elston]

First, I don't care what Republicans want or think about it. Like one guy said yesterday, there are two parties in this country: The Party Who Wants To Be Socialists, and The Party Who Doesn't Quite Want To Be Socialists. I'm The Guy Who Wants Government To Be Cuffed, Chained, Restrained, Choked and Stopped.

What do you think about the Alaska Permanent Fund? It is a bona fide socialist program, managed and supported by Sarah Palin.

I'm worried not about the Republicans wanting tellers wages to be helped. I'm worried that the teller won't have a job to earn a wage because the fat cat banker is getting soaked by the federal government and getting regulated, supervised and basically dictated-to to the point that being a fat cat banker isn't worth it and the bank itself has a talent drain and closes up. That's the teller's problem, too.

Former Lehman Brother's staff don't have jobs. If economists and history are to be believed, neither would tellers and other staff at the banks in question, were it not for Bush's bailout. I personally wish that they, and we, would have taken the hit and the opportunity to reform our monetary system. Instead, the federal government chose to bail the banks out. Why? Because that's what the banks were screaming for, and because Paulson was one of them.

Tim, your ideology is strongly defined by a dichotomy between government as bad and the private sector as good. Personally I think that is naive. There is a degree of truth to it, but it is the smaller degree. For the most part the federal government is an agent of the private sector. Washington is practically owned by big business. Most of what gets passed legislatively is lobbied for by corporations, and there is a tightly controlled revolving door between boards of directors and executive offices, on the one hand, and key government positions, on the other. Campaign finance reform fails because elections are funded, and favors bought, by big corporations. Immigration reform fails because the business sector can't tolerate it. The rhetoric of big government vs. private enterprise is obsolete. The federal government is the legitimating, loophole making arm of big business.

What I'll do is give forty dollars to any charity you name if unemployment doesn't exceed 10% nationally within a year. If it does do that, then I'll be right, the price of which will far exceed my paltry donation for being wrong.

Unemployment just hit 8.5% and likely will exceed 10%. But without Bush's bailout and Obama's stimulus, it certainly would wind up being much higher. So while your offer to pay $40 to a charity of my choice is commendable, it doesn't constitute a challenge to my position. A more telling offer, but impossible to make, would be to say that you would donate to a charity of my choice if the rate of unemployment without a bailout and stimulus did not exceed the rate of unemployment with them.

This egg can't be unscrambled. What they did was bait these companies into accepting this money so that they could then assert the control in the name of accountability. They knew full well what they were doing. The whole strategy is to socialize commerce. Even IF they were to successfully police the use of TARP money and bailout money by these companies, they are flooding private citizens with tax burdens in the form of public debt. They are assuming full control of all aspects of corporate governance and overflowing the money supply. They are breaking us and taking us over.

This is where we lose a lot of common ground. It is apparent to me that Bush and Paulson were pressured by Wall Street to come to its rescue. Paulson was a willing player, but he was taken off guard. Bush was a reluctant player, and he authorized it late. The only scheming that was done was by Wall Street to spread a "the world can't live without us" fear campaign and Wall Street's cronies in Washington, like Paulson and Frank. The Bush bailout hardly is according to your characterization, as I see it, Tim.

By the time Obama took office there was still roughly half of the bailout money to give away, but for the most part it had already been allocated to go to its intended recipients. The money was not loosening up credit as expected, and Obama started publicly questioning their hoarding of the money, in the context of continued multimillion dollar bonuses. When Obama and Congress felt the heat from the public, they started talking legislation to force the bailed out banks' hands. All of a sudden the banks started saying that they didn't need the money any more! Well, I do declare! They will take it when they think it's free, but when it's going to put a crimp in their $30 million bonus, all of a sudden the poor little old banks can do without us, thank you very much.

My bigger point in pointing out the existence of the argument is that the government is the catalyst for this, the proximate cause. Did they work alone? No. But, their problem was bad enough, now their remedy is worse than the illness.

I agree that governmnet is the catalyst, but it is the catalyst for the financial industry. To mix metaphors, a catalyst is a worker bee for the queen. The government is the worker bee, and the financial industry is the queen. Now that Obama dares use this crisis as justifiable leverage to take the queen down a notch, the fat cats are crying fowl. They love government when they own it and manipulate it to do its bidding, which is the bidding of redistribution of wages from the working masses to the coffers of magnates, but all of a sudden we hear a spike in the old anti-government rhetoric as soon as an administration wants to put the brakes on their self-serving, people-ruining bonanza.

That's my idiomatic way of saying open up the interior of the country for us to use and exploit freely and otherwise stay away federal government, and keep us safe from harm from without. Local government has pretty much maintained roads, except for the interstate system. I don't propose to change that by my little idiom.

Personally, I think that the root problem is humans, not government. Government is a problem because humans are a problem. Business is a problem because humans are a problem. Government owned by business is a problem because humans are a problem. Government controlling business is a problem because humans are a problem. The last twenty years have shown us what happens when big business takes over control of government. I personally would like to see a little separation, and if Obama can accomplish it, more power to him. I don't think that Obama has in mind anything like the takeover of business that you fear. In fact, I think that Washington's takeover by Wall Street is so pervasive that there is no chance of correcting it short of national collapse. There is no extricating ourselves from the grip of big money on our national throat, and it will either choke our nation into oblivion or an armed revolution on the right or left will oust it when it weakens. But I don't think that the ideological dichotomy between government and business reflects much reality any more.

With government and these big companies, the government is immortal. It has the power to overtake by force and to print money out of thin air. It isn't going to wish the corporate world well; it is going to grab it, position it under the government and land on it and then blame it for not being a good cord manager when it can no longer speak for itself as it walks away from the flattened, smashed remains.

This makes me think that you haven't yet integrated the concept of money as debt, debt as growth. In our monetary system, the government does not print money out of thin air. Money is created out of thin air every time a loan is made. Growth is defined as an increase in debt. And because debt comes at interest, growth comes at interest. And because interest compounds, the cost of growth compounds. Growth must outpace compounding interest in order to be defined as growth, which means that debt must outpace compounding interest, which means that debt must compound, which means that debt must increase on an exponential debt curve. I have said this perhaps twenty times on Jude 2 and received no apparent interest in it. I don't think people get it.

In any case, our money supply is under the control of the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank. The United States government doesn't even have control of the currency that bears its name. Our government is not sovereign over the United State currency. Personally I think it would introduce a proper separation of government and business for the government to take back control of the money supply. But as it is, it doesn't have that control, so your point about our government being able to print its way out of hock and without concern for the private sector is fundamentally unsound.

In my view, the idea of a responsible government is like the image of a well-mannered cannibal. Since FDR, government has overconsumed us. I see no way, practically or theoretically, in which government CAN be responsible. Throwing money to the wind is exactly what the government continues to do as it talks about being responsible. The insult, as I feel and see it at least, is the government expecting me to believe that it is going to do anything truly good or right. With few exceptions, it hasn't in more than 70 years. (The one exception, and even it is arguable in some circles, was WWII.)

I am as fundamentally skeptical of government in the hands of big business and of unregulated big business, as you are of government per se. In short, I am skeptical of power, regardless of the color of its sheeps clothing.

I'm saying that government does nothing with money BUT squander it. It does nothing with power but grab it. It does nothing with freedom except to smother it. Our government has not, since 1937 or before, acted in any way truly in the public interest because the public interest ceased to be defined in terms individual liberty and was redefined in terms of federal power under the Interstate Commerce Clause.

These statements are too radical for me to endorse: "does nothing with money BUT squander it," "does nothing with power but grab it." It is always prone to overextend its reach, but to say that it does nothing with money but squander it is to say, for example, that any government spending is illegitimate. It is to say that spending on defense is by definition to squander. It is to say that the Interstate system built by Eisenhower was a squandering of money.

Okay, and setting aside the value of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for individual liberties, I understand the logic of the complaint against the Interstate Commerce Clause. But let me ask you, For whom did you vote in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008? I voted straight Republican from 1980 through 2000. In 2004 and 2008 I voted for the Constitution Party candidates, who are, at least in word, small government. If you voted for Republican Party candidates, especially in the last two elections, then you are not putting your vote where your mouth is, are you?

I won't be happy with it, but I am going to have to learn to live with it and what it causes.

If my expectations are correct, Obama will double the national debt, assuming an eight-year presidency, and the next president will double it yet again, and so on every ten years or so. All the while both business and government--that is, those two entities fully joined at the hip, chest, and head--will fiercely resist and malign efforts to change the monetary system, which is the direct cause of both bubbles and bailouts. I think it's all a fait accompli, and it is out of everyone's power to stop the inevitable. Conservatives will blame liberals, and liberals will blame conservatives. All the while both will fiercely resist fixing the problem because it is not in their ideological interests, as they define them, to fix it.

[pastorables]

I'm saying that government does nothing with money BUT squander it. It does nothing with power but grab it. It does nothing with freedom except to smother it.

I smell a "tag" line coming.

[MacUser]

Tim, I am hearing you..

First.. it's just that we are not snowed in. It's nearly spring everywhere else. We need to be brief.

Second.. having such a huge "run on" debate never focuses anything. To communicate effectively the message has to be condensed into core principle points based on values and judgements. An actual debate can ensue to win that heart and mind.

But also extremely large generalizations, such as, humans are the problem.. never will resolve anything either. Let me add one as well... If we don't know where we come from.. we will never know where we are going.

Hey its beautiful outside.. gotta run..

[dolfan]

We've been pasting quotes from one another and responding in counterpoint sort of fashion, and that's hard to read. I know, I don't like reading that sort of back and forth. Sometimes, though, it's hard to discuss things without doing that. So, this is a continuation of that conversation, and feel free to ignore it. I just didn't think you deserved to have to read through all of that other time and again if you wanted to keep posting on the thread. Sprry.

So, I'll pick it up here ----

What do you think about the Alaska Permanent Fund? It is a bona fide socialist program, managed and supported by Sarah Palin.

I really don't know anything about it. Alabama governors can't stay out of jail (the last one) or have problems with honesty (the current one). None of that would bother me if they'd just not show up for work for a year or so.

Former Lehman Brother's staff don't have jobs. If economists and history are to be believed, neither would tellers and other staff at the banks in question, were it not for Bush's bailout. I personally wish that they, and we, would have taken the hit and the opportunity to reform our monetary system. Instead, the federal government chose to bail the banks out. Why? Because that's what the banks were screaming for, and because Paulson was one of them.

Listen, I'm with you. Let me be clear (don't you hate that phrase?): the banks are not blameless. They are partners in crime on this thing. You know, you mention in another part of your post that I have this government=bad, private sector=good dichotomy. Allow me to disabuse you of that notion, please.

Be it banks, defense contractors, tobacco companies, brewers and distillers, farmers, and anyone else you can conceive -- they all have groups that lobby hard for preferences and subsidies in form or another from government. They have worked to create and preserve a system designed to funnel money and power to themselves as much and as perniciously as the elected officials themselves. They work together, a unity that is so intertwined that you cannot separate one from the other. My slings and arrows are for them as well.

BUT .... and you knew that was coming ... the first line of public trust is with the elected officials, and the last resort of restraint has been placed with them as well. When restraint is ignored or, as it is now, expressly disfavored, the public trust is destroyed. These officials have the unique ability to turn off the power of moneyed interests, but they won't. They won't because they are drunk with the power and wealth they generate with them. Our votes plus lobby money equals our own demise as a free republic. Now, I don't know who else to blame, and if I could take the time and thought to do it, I'd find it. HOWEVER , ultimately there is one place with its hand on the spigot, and that's Washington, DC. They've tapped into the barrel so deeply, though, that will never turn it off. Meanwhile, it is the people, the workers, the families, the retired folks, that suffer the consequences of bloated, intrusive government.

Unemployment just hit 8.5% and likely will exceed 10%. But without Bush's bailout and Obama's stimulus, it certainly would wind up being much higher. So while your offer to pay $40 to a charity of my choice is commendable, it doesn't constitute a challenge to my position. A more telling offer, but impossible to make, would be to say that you would donate to a charity of my choice if the rate of unemployment without a bailout and stimulus did not exceed the rate of unemployment with them.

Well, it's meaningless because it is impossible, but I would donate to a charity of your choice if the rate of unemployment without a bailout and stimulus did not exceed the rate of unemployment without them.

This egg can't be unscrambled. What they did was bait these companies into accepting this money so that they could then assert the control in the name of accountability. They knew full well what they were doing. The whole strategy is to socialize commerce. Even IF they were to successfully police the use of TARP money and bailout money by these companies, they are flooding private citizens with tax burdens in the form of public debt. They are assuming full control of all aspects of corporate governance and overflowing the money supply. They are breaking us and taking us over.

This is where we lose a lot of common ground. It is apparent to me that Bush and Paulson were pressured by Wall Street to come to its rescue. Paulson was a willing player, but he was taken off guard. Bush was a reluctant player, and he authorized it late. The only scheming that was done was by Wall Street to spread a "the world can't live without us" fear campaign and Wall Street's cronies in Washington, like Paulson and Frank. The Bush bailout hardly is according to your characterization, as I see it, Tim.

Let me, for the sake of argument, concede this as fact. Firms that manipulated the government to get the bailout money are now trying to repay it. Some are ready, willing and able, or expect soon to be, to pay it back. That should be the end of the story, the end of this horrid affair as far as the bailout and those companies are concerned. Obama said last week he wants "government capital", as he called it, to stay in the market. If Wall Street did as you say, and I don't dispute that they did come running with their hands out, good government does not mean larger and more intrusive government. The government can recoup its revenue and not repeat the error of bailing bad big businesses out again. Let them fail. But, it won't do that. It wants control, and by George (and now by Obama), they're going to have it to the point of muscling around who the execs are and how much they'll make. It is an unnecessary move as to some of these companies, but it is one the federal government is bent on making.

By the time Obama took office there was still roughly half of the bailout money to give away, but for the most part it had already been allocated to go to its intended recipients. The money was not loosening up credit as expected, and Obama started publicly questioning their hoarding of the money, in the context of continued multimillion dollar bonuses. When Obama and Congress felt the heat from the public, they started talking legislation to force the bailed out banks' hands. All of a sudden the banks started saying that they didn't need the money any more! Well, I do declare! They will take it when they think it's free, but when it's going to put a crimp in their $30 million bonus, all of a sudden the poor little old banks can do without us, thank you very much.

Well ...... yeah. So, what? That's glib on purpose. Look, anybody will take free money. I mean, we've already established that these big businesses are monsters, right? They're pulling the strings of the likes of Paulson and Barney Frank. They're manipulating perceptions to spook government into a bailout. And government handed them a check and said, "Here, no conditions. Just take it. We trust you." Now, government has trusted them, right? And, they just hold the dough. They wait. They wait until Obama takes office because they figure he's going to do exactly what he's done. Then, they try and repay the money and the federal government says, "No. Do what we say or you'll pay dearly."

It's a power play. The problem is, Tim, that the federal government -- whether it has clean hands or not and whether the big corporations have clean hands or not -- is NOT the guarantor of corporate welfare. These corporations hire US to work for them. They buy our goods and services (well, they used to) and we make our living working for them. We build small business and mid-sized businesses and other big businesses to support and make happen what they offer, and we buy what they make and supply with what we earn. Now, all that's elementary enough, but the common ground that we DO have is that you and I and everyone else are part of this "We". The government, from the get-go, is "of, by and for" the "We." Now, it is no longer that. It is a government "of, by and for" the "Them". Actually controlling corporate governance, and dictating the scope of use of private property (by tax, regulation, etc.), and confiscating wealth from little citizen to big corporation in the form of taxes and using them to fund the agendas of "Them", and laying the cost of that at the feet of the "We" (even in part) is not what the Founders envisioned and it is not what I want for me, my family and my daughter.

Honestly, if America is to become what Obama wants it to be --- if America is to become what the Republicans and Democrats in Washington and elsewhere want it to be --- then I don't want to be part of it. I wouldn't fight for it, and I would actively discourage anyone I knew from doing so. This....thing.... that we've got now is not worth sacrificing blood for it. I believe that I have a God-given obligation to be the sovereign of my home, and a God-given obligation to support and encourage and help people around me, my neighbors. Above that, I yield to the power of the government so as to keep myself in the same household with my family and not behind bars. But, I do not consider America now to be "my country". And, I'm still formulating this thought, but, beyond my duties to be kindly disposed to my neighbors, to love my enemies and to seek peace with all men, I've got no use for our federal government. It is not of me, it is not for me and most certainly is not by me, regardless of which party is in power. There is a general sense in which the government maintains stability among the population by providing certain securities and amenities, etc., but it is not for the sake of freedom that it does so. It is to keep the slaves tame. And, I'll be a slave to it (I have no choice, nor do any of us short of leaving the country), but I won't be a good one or a quiet one or one that is comforted by dancing to the master's tune. Peace is not that sweet, as Patrick Henry stated.

What I don't know is whether the love for limited government, for constitutional government, is merely dormant or dead. I fear it is dead. I'm hoping that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Boehner, McCain, Graham, and Shelby, et.al., will do just enough violence to us that we start looking for answers. I'm hoping that the church answers that call, but I doubt it will. Behind that, I'm hoping that someone will rekindle the desires of Aaron Burr or James Madison for our time. Or, at least in my daughter's lifetime.

Now that Obama dares use this crisis as justifiable leverage... the fat cats are crying fowl. They love government when they own it and manipulate it to do its bidding, which is the bidding of redistribution of wages from the working masses to the coffers of magnates, but all of a sudden we hear a spike in the old anti-government rhetoric as soon as an administration wants to put the brakes on their self-serving, people-ruining bonanza.

Government should never have been sold to them. That's the problem. Power. And, let's be honest, wealth does not get created by the small worker and redistributed upward. The small worker is part of the big wealth owner when the work is produced. Wages are always going to flow back to the big businesses. Who else is their to buy from? Government doesn't make anything, yet it keeps selling and selling and selling and charging and charging and charging. It's a house of cards, a charade. What we've established is that big business and government corrupt each other. I accept that. I also accept that big business was not then, is not now nor never was intended to be a product of, subservient to, the people. In theory it is in some limited ways through the marketplace and competition and what have you. But, the government was always intended to be just that and nothing more, at least until FDR and the occupants of the other branches of government that acted in complicity with him to create a new way of governing the nation that essentially murdered constitutional, limited government. I don't want a government that does one bit more than is absolutely necessary to meet the most minimal of constitutional exercies of power.

In fact, I think that Washington's takeover by Wall Street is so pervasive that there is no chance of correcting it short of national collapse. There is no extricating ourselves from the grip of big money on our national throat, and it will either choke our nation into oblivion or an armed revolution on the right or left will oust it when it weakens. But I don't think that the ideological dichotomy between government and business reflects much reality any more.

The lines are way too blurred. I don't maintain that dichotomy. Again, this egg can't be unscrambled. I agree with your statement here, but I don't attribute it to a "takeover by Wall Street". I attribute it to a for sale sign hung out by the government. That distinction may not matter, though. We've still got what we've got.

This makes me think that you haven't yet integrated the concept of money as debt, debt as growth. In our monetary system, the government does not print money out of thin air. Money is created out of thin air every time a loan is made. Growth is defined as an increase in debt. And because debt comes at interest, growth comes at interest. And because interest compounds, the cost of growth compounds. Growth must outpace compounding interest in order to be defined as growth, which means that debt must outpace compounding interest, which means that debt must compound, which means that debt must increase on an exponential debt curve. I have said this perhaps twenty times on Jude 2 and received no apparent interest in it. I don't think people get it.

Let me extract the bolded statement (my bolding) from that and respond. I do get it. I also get that Congress was given the constitutional power to regulate money. Congress could have stopped this very problem you describe, but it embraced, fed, nurtured and cared for it instead.

In any case, our money supply is under the control of the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank. The United States government doesn't even have control of the currency that bears its name. Our government is not sovereign over the United State currency. Personally I think it would introduce a proper separation of government and business for the government to take back control of the money supply.

Absolutely dead on.

But as it is, it doesn't have that control, so your point about our government being able to print its way out of hock and without concern for the private sector is fundamentally unsound.

We can't print out way out of hock. The federal government can print our way (and, understand, when I say print I don't mean physically print -- dollars now are electronic credits assigned to accounts, and truly are thin air) into bailouts, though. It will do so in order to grow its power, and these private companies .... however much and in whatever ways they are to blame for helping precipitate this mess .... are being what I call squashed, what you call leveraged. The casualty in it all is the idea of private property, and with that is economic liberty and with that is personal liberty. If you don't think that is so, next April ask a local small business owner how much more taxes they've paid in the current year and how much more expensive it has gotten not just to be in business, but to meet the government requirements of businesses and how that impacts their business decisions.

I am as fundamentally skeptical of government in the hands of big business and of unregulated big business, as you are of government per se. In short, I am skeptical of power, regardless of the color of its sheeps clothing.

Since we're both so skeptical of power, why do either of us give credit to either one of these? Well, for one, I can tell you that I can identify the government specifically. I know who is to blame when I look at it. And, fact is, none of them are innocent. They're all guilty as you-know-what, regardless of party. I listen to Rush Limbaugh, and I think, "For all this talk about personal liberty you do, why did you carry water for the Republican Party for so long?" I listen to Sean Hannity and I think, while I'm listening to him interview Fred Thompson on Friday, "Hannity, you're part of the problem. By giving voice to these establishment guys, you only show that you're one of them. Fred Thompson thought he'd run on his charm and his celebrity and did just about as little as anybody ever did to actually try to be president. He looked and acted lazy, and now he's being so civil and so deferential to 'the other side' as he talks to you." There are two sides, but it isn't liberals vs. conservatives, Dems vs. Repubs, left vs. right. It's us vs. government. As far as I'm concerned, Hannity is one side of a coin that Pelosi is the other side of. But, when I say that, I know who it is, I know who does what. So, it is easy to affix blame.

Corporations have the benefit of some anonymity of persons to blame. I don't know who pulls all the strings at GM, for example. And, my rage against GM is demonstrated if I don't buy GM products. Truly, that's all the rage that is appropriate. As it is, I don't have a choice but to buy what the government is selling even if I never use most of it. They extract the purchase from me and you, then give us what they want us to have and do what they want. But, I'm supposed to be a part of this government. GM serves me only when I do business with it; the US Government is supposed to serve me, period. No, thanks. As I said before, pave the roads and protect the borders and leave me alone.

Okay, and setting aside the value of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for individual liberties, I understand the logic of the complaint against the Interstate Commerce Clause. But let me ask you, For whom did you vote in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008? I voted straight Republican from 1980 through 2000. In 2004 and 2008 I voted for the Constitution Party candidates, who are, at least in word, small government. If you voted for Republican Party candidates, especially in the last two elections, then you are not putting your vote where your mouth is, are you?

You're right. I voted out of fear of Obama and against my own principles.

If my expectations are correct, Obama will double the national debt, assuming an eight-year presidency, and the next president will double it yet again, and so on every ten years or so. All the while both business and government--that is, those two entities fully joined at the hip, chest, and head--will fiercely resist and malign efforts to change the monetary system, which is the direct cause of both bubbles and bailouts. I think it's all a fait accompli, and it is out of everyone's power to stop the inevitable. Conservatives will blame liberals, and liberals will blame conservatives. All the while both will fiercely resist fixing the problem because it is not in their ideological interests, as they define them, to fix it.

Yeah, I think you're right here, too. I wish you weren't.

[Tim Elston]

Tim, I wasn't able to read or respond to this yesterday, and I just now read it. I love it! Awesome discussion! Thanks for such constructive and insightful communication. This is the kind of depth that brings people together and makes them appreciate each other. I want you to know that I feel edified! Besides that I need to prioritize some other responsibilities, there is a lot to digest in your post, and I'll need a chunk of free time to think and construct a response. But in general I think we've achieved some semantic clarity, and I find myself to be in much agreement with you. On many, and perhaps most, points our difference is a matter of emphasis. What I appreciate about this quality of dialog is that it achieves truth with respect to the view that the interlocutors have of each other and each other's views. What a breath of fresh air! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!

[dolfan]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21053.html

Dollar backed by force? Looks like it to me. How can we be at war economically with our largest creditor??? How do we continue to indebt ourselves to a nation that we'd bother simulating an economic war game with? Can you imagine Kennedy and Kruschev trading arms technology? Or, Reagan and Gorbachev selling each other ICBM data?? This is insanity!

[Full Quiver]

Tim if the Alaskan Permanent Fund is oil proceeds to citizens then I will comment. It seems to work well but it in essence is not capitalist. I have lots of thoughts about this and they go back and forth. right to left to right.

[Tim Elston]

Well, it's meaningless because it is impossible, but I would donate to a charity of your choice if the rate of unemployment without a bailout and stimulus did not exceed the rate of unemployment without them.

I got a good kick out of this.

Firms that manipulated the government to get the bailout money are now trying to repay it. Some are ready, willing and able, or expect soon to be, to pay it back. That should be the end of the story, the end of this horrid affair as far as the bailout and those companies are concerned. Obama said last week he wants "government capital", as he called it, to stay in the market.

Yeah, after you posted about that Politico article, I found it and read it. I compared it to a few other articles about the same meeting, and I found it to be the best, most informative. I'm of a mind to take a wait and see approach to my judgment on this. Where I sympathize with Obama is that we are still in the throes of macro-economic risk, and he will be judged, in the final analysis, by the outcome. I personally think that it is reasonable for him to want to control the crisis recovery process since, like it or not, the onus is on the government to achieve an outcome. I don't hold it against him for not wanting to let the banks loose too quickly before things stabilize.

Again, I personally would have preferred the chips to fall where they may without a bailout or so-called stimulus package, but I recognize that I am in a minority and that most of the electorate, while being hopping mad about the bailout, would blame the government for not providing one if there were a collapse. But I still think it is within short-term tactical reason to want to keep reigns on the process at this point. If it turns into a strategic goal to nationalize banks for the long term, I would have to rethink that. I am deeply suspicious of the banking system, whether in private or public hands, so I'm not sure what I would think about it at this point.

It's a power play. The problem is, Tim, that the federal government -- whether it has clean hands or not and whether the big corporations have clean hands or not -- is NOT the guarantor of corporate welfare. These corporations hire US to work for them. They buy our goods and services (well, they used to) and we make our living working for them. We build small business and mid-sized businesses and other big businesses to support and make happen what they offer, and we buy what they make and supply with what we earn. Now, all that's elementary enough, but the common ground that we DO have is that you and I and everyone else are part of this "We". The government, from the get-go, is "of, by and for" the "We." Now, it is no longer that. It is a government "of, by and for" the "Them". Actually controlling corporate governance, and dictating the scope of use of private property (by tax, regulation, etc.), and confiscating wealth from little citizen to big corporation in the form of taxes and using them to fund the agendas of "Them", and laying the cost of that at the feet of the "We" (even in part) is not what the Founders envisioned and it is not what I want for me, my family and my daughter.

Honestly, if America is to become what Obama wants it to be --- if America is to become what the Republicans and Democrats in Washington and elsewhere want it to be --- then I don't want to be part of it. I wouldn't fight for it, and I would actively discourage anyone I knew from doing so. This....thing.... that we've got now is not worth sacrificing blood for it. I believe that I have a God-given obligation to be the sovereign of my home, and a God-given obligation to support and encourage and help people around me, my neighbors. Above that, I yield to the power of the government so as to keep myself in the same household with my family and not behind bars. But, I do not consider America now to be "my country". And, I'm still formulating this thought, but, beyond my duties to be kindly disposed to my neighbors, to love my enemies and to seek peace with all men, I've got no use for our federal government. It is not of me, it is not for me and most certainly is not by me, regardless of which party is in power. There is a general sense in which the government maintains stability among the population by providing certain securities and amenities, etc., but it is not for the sake of freedom that it does so. It is to keep the slaves tame. And, I'll be a slave to it (I have no choice, nor do any of us short of leaving the country), but I won't be a good one or a quiet one or one that is comforted by dancing to the master's tune. Peace is not that sweet, as Patrick Henry stated.

What I don't know is whether the love for limited government, for constitutional government, is merely dormant or dead. I fear it is dead. I'm hoping that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Frank, Boehner, McCain, Graham, and Shelby, et.al., will do just enough violence to us that we start looking for answers. I'm hoping that the church answers that call, but I doubt it will. Behind that, I'm hoping that someone will rekindle the desires of Aaron Burr or James Madison for our time. Or, at least in my daughter's lifetime.

Government should never have been sold to them. That's the problem. Power. And, let's be honest, wealth does not get created by the small worker and redistributed upward. The small worker is part of the big wealth owner when the work is produced. Wages are always going to flow back to the big businesses. Who else is their to buy from? Government doesn't make anything, yet it keeps selling and selling and selling and charging and charging and charging. It's a house of cards, a charade. What we've established is that big business and government corrupt each other. I accept that. I also accept that big business was not then, is not now nor never was intended to be a product of, subservient to, the people. In theory it is in some limited ways through the marketplace and competition and what have you. But, the government was always intended to be just that and nothing more, at least until FDR and the occupants of the other branches of government that acted in complicity with him to create a new way of governing the nation that essentially murdered constitutional, limited government. I don't want a government that does one bit more than is absolutely necessary to meet the most minimal of constitutional exercies of power.

The lines are way too blurred. I don't maintain that dichotomy. Again, this egg can't be unscrambled. I agree with your statement here, but I don't attribute it to a "takeover by Wall Street". I attribute it to a for sale sign hung out by the government. That distinction may not matter, though. We've still got what we've got.

All of this is worth a degree in political science. What I am struggling with is coming to an overall philosophy of power. On the one hand government is prone to control and limit freedom. On the other hand big business is prone to control and limit freedom. It is true that big business creates jobs; it is also true that big business monopolizes and exploits. It is true that government stifles big business; it is also true that government protects from monopoly and exploitation. There is a sense in which democratically coerced government functions as recourse against the abuse of power, and therein lies the problem with power buying out government and government selling out to power. In this role government ought to be the strength of the people to defeat the monopolistic, exploitative designs and practices of the powerful.

But this is where the distinction between democracy and conservatism gets complicated for me. Is American conservatism about the preservation of democracy or about the preservation of power? I don't mean to ask this accusatorily. I mean that the concepts are fuzzy for me. Was the "American experiment" that the Founders conceived about a battle between government and business per se or between power and freedom? Was it about the freedom of power to rule, or was it about the freedom of the powerless from the powerful? Did they idealize the weakness of government in the interests of their own established power within a republican system, or did they envision it to be a mechanism of democratic rule by which the people defeated the rise of abusive power? Does "small government" really get at what the American vision was all about, or was the idea more generally liberty? Is liberty ever served by the strength of the people to rise up through democratic institutions to defeat monopoly and exploitation? Theoretically, should government be small and weak as a matter of principle, or is the principle of concern the liberty of the people to react against abuse? Could the principle of liberty ever be served by a democratically sensitive government acting in strength against systemic exploitation?

I'm not so sure, except to say that I don't trust either people with power or people without it. I can see that power needs a counterweight of power to keep it in check. I can see that good power tends to become bad power. So I am abivalent. It used to be that a working man's wage could provide for his family. It used to be that saving money was both possible and advisable. It used to be that top executives' salaries were reaonably larger than their average worker's income. It used to be that government service was a civil service instead of a private interest. I agree that the eggs can't be unscrambled now, and since they can't, I believe that government should be a strong enough vehicle through which a democratic electorate should be able to protect itself from systemic abuse.

Sorry, I took this to an abstact and probably less useful level.