DABlog

The bailout bill has just passed. I know very little about economics, little enough that I don’t feel entitled to a strong opinion one way or the other on whether the bill should have passed. But I am suspicious of it.

I’m suspicious of it, for one thing, because of the fear-mongering that has surrounded it; it’s very reminiscent of the ongoing “Terrorists will come and kill your family if the executive branch doesn’t get a blank check for waging undeclared war” campaign, and things in that vein.

But I’m even more suspicious of the bill because of all the rhetoric about how it will help “Main Street” as well as “Wall Street”. I don’t know whether it will or not, but what troubles me is the fact that this kind of rhetoric makes it sound like Congress and the Bush administration are desperate to help Main Street. The fact is that, in general, they’re not.

Every microsecond of every day in the history of this country there have been uncountable opportunities for the government to help citizens with financial problems, difficulty paying for a home, lack of job opportunities, inability to get credit, and all the rest of it. The thrust of the behavior of the government for most of the history of the country has been not to bother helping such people to any significant degree.

Now, all of a sudden, helping Main Street leaps to the front of the congressional and executive agenda. I’m disinclined to buy it. If the common weal were really a government priority, we would have known by now. I find it immensely suspicious that the greatest outpouring of social concern, at least as measured in money, comes tethered to a Wall Street bailout.

If Main Street is going to benefit from the delivery of a de facto blank check to Wall Street, surely it would not benefit any less from having money delivered to it directly. But you don’t hear any talk of, say, the government purchasing houses for the victims of fiscal mismanagement. I suppose it would have taken too long to draft a bill that did that; and as we know, the earth would have left its axis if the bill had not been passed this week….