The Freddie-Fannie Gamble

The McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden campaigns should be asked for their views.

Never mind the government intervention and _intrusion_ into what ought to be only private, and never mind the moral hazard, except --

it makes me wonder if this will make it more or less likely the Obama crowd will seek or suggest a bailout of the Big Three, and will the Big Three and the UAW also respond in a similar way.

A government bailout has become necessary because there were not enough regulations on the subprime mortgage market. It was a free-for-all which encouraged those who couldn't afford it to assume risky loans. Yes, they should have known better, but the loans should never have been issued in the first place. Now the economy, which was largely built on the housing boom, is tanking. The industry should have been regulated more tightly in the first place.

This underscores yet again the inevitable and so far, universal effect of so-called free market capitalism, summarized as:

Privatize, deregulate, cut government services.

The result is this:

Transfer of public wealth to private wealth, transfer of private debt to public debt, radically increased wealth gap.

There is not a single country in which the Milton Friedman mantra has performed otherwise, including our own.