The American Spectator

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'Privatizing Profits, Socializing Losses'

By Robert Stacy McCain on 9.20.08 @ 12:35AM

So says Michelle Malkin about the Mother of All Bail-Outs, adding:

I have had it with Pollyanna conservatives who continue to parrot the "fundamentals of the market are great!" line.
The fundamentals of the market suck. The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.

Many of my libertarian friends bear a deep resentment toward Michelle Malkin -- mostly because of Bush and the war, both of which the libertarians loathe -- but it should be remembered that Malkin's big break was winning the 1995 Warren Brookes Fellowship from the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. (The Brookes Fellowship was more recently held by Jeremy Lott and is currently held by Lene Johansen.) There are times when Malkin's inner libertarian speaks loudly, and this is one of them.

As to the MOABO, she's absolutely right, of course. Wall Street has essentially blackmailed U.S. taxpayers into footing the bill for managerial greed, ineptitude and corruption. The alternative to the bailout is economic collapse, yet there's no prospect of recouping the millions collected by the executives who were (over)paid to run these institutions into bankruptcy. They reap the profits, taxpayers absorb the losses.

And what "reforms" are proposed to solve the inevitable problems caused by bad regulations, subsidies and corporate welfare? More of the same. Lather, rinse, repeat.

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Conservatism