More on Bailout Proposal

Outside The Beltway:

Bernanke says, "There are no atheists in foxholes and no ideologues in financial crises." But if there's ever a time to hold strong to fundamental principles, it would seem that this would be it. We're setting precedents that will govern the behavior of the international business community for decades to come. Do we really want to signal that risks are public and rewards are private?

Yglesias:

[B]ad policies get enacted all the time. But we're at a point now where congress is, allegedly, in the hands of progressive leadership. Simply put, if congressional Democrats manage to acquiesce in a plan that spends $700 billion on a bailout while doing nothing for average working people and giving the taxpayer virtually no upside in a way that guarantees that even electoral victory would give an Obama administration no resources with which to implement a progressive domestic agenda in 2009 then everyone's going to have to give serious consideration to becoming a pretty hard-core libertarian.

Monday, September 22, 2008