Say Anything Blog

The Heritage Foundation says the bailout package is “vital and acceptable.”

Americans for Prosperity say they are reluctantly supporting it:

The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act is far from a perfect bill, although some of the worst aspects of earlier drafts have been removed,  including the so-called affordable housing trust fund, the say-for-pay rules, and proxy access provisions.  Still, the EESA does nothing to address the causes of the current crisis and it carries a frightening risk of permanently increasing the role of government in the economy, which could lead to worse market-distortions and future crises.  We shudder at the thought of Congress and bureaucrats controlling our country’s credit markets. Interest group politics could be injected into every aspect of economic life.

We hope that these concerns can be addressed and a path to well-functioning free markets can be established in coming weeks.  The current crisis, however, is grave.  There were other options that deserved greater consideration, but the choice today is the EESA or inaction, and inaction is not a good option.

Dick Armey and his Freedom Works Foundation, however, maintains that the bailout isn’t worth it:

The difficult question each member of Congress faces today is simply this: Do you believe that the political process, having produced many of the perverse incentives that resulted in our economy’s current predicament, can solve these underlying distortions by essentially doing more of the same? I believe the answer to this question is unequivocally NO.

I’m with Armey, and I’m a little surprised that both AFP and the Heritage foundation would support the bailout despite the obvious problems with it.  Problems they themselves recognize.

Yes, the cost of no bailout is high.  But is it higher than the cost of the bailout?  I think it is, especially when you consider that with this bailout we are only delaying an inevitable collapse of the finance industry which is built on an unsteady foundation of too much government interference and too much crony capitalism.