Robbing Peter To Pay Paul

I am taking a break from writing today, but I have an excellent submission from columnist, friend, and fellow Southern Patriot William Barr. These are his thoughts for the week.
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It's been an exciting quadrennial election year in some ways.

Listen to Congress on C-Span and tell me we aren't exchanging creeping for a galloping socialism.

Consider creating federal equity in our financial institutions via government acquisition of their more toxic assets. This means that shortly we shall have the ailing automotive industry bellying up to the bailout bar, and that's only one major industry we can expect to see with their paws out.

What shall we do if (when?) Treasury bills cannot attract buyers, given that Bush's bailout of big finance is predicated on the wholesale creation of another marketable treasury security, Treasury notes? As to what happens to Uncle Sam's line of credit with foreign banks, one based more and more on bad loans, the Lord only knows.

Has anybody thought through the implications of the Uncle Sam "owning so much paper, including bad mortgages, and what happens when the feds come to collect...what should they do so?"

That's a question raised by Charles H. Featherstone, a freelance business journalist living in Chicago, who sees that if the politics of home ownership has heretofore been a mess, it will worsen when federal judges routinely decide who gets to stay in their homes. That's the position currently embraced by congressional Democrats--surprise, surprise.

And we thought that we already had an imperial judiciary!

I'm with Featherstone, a blogger at lewrockwell.com, when it comes to the imperative of closely following the money in the bruited $700 billion-bailout of the week.

In this election season, we live in a brief moment when national politicians shuck off their proconsular rhetoric and demeanor and put on an the aspect of the Old Republic. It's a ritual in living history, not unlike suburbanite weekend-warriors reenacting Confederate military feats through encampments and mock battles.

High and low, national politicians are swooning over votes from an imperiled middle class. Thus, isn't it about time someone "considered the very real inflationary effects of adding gazillions more meaningless dollars to the U.S. economy?" That's what Featherstone demanded last week, and it seems reasonable to me. Drying up the pension funds and savings of the middle class through an inflationary monetary policy, one which as well erodes the value of wages, indicates the particular backs on which the Bush bailout is borne.

Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And how, demands Featherstone, does "the US federal gummint pay for all these wars, all this domestic welfare, subsidize everything good and wonderful in its sight, and bail out investment banking and insurance firms at the same time?" I confess that this question especially engages my attention as I urge abolition of foreign aid in my Thursday columns in the Paris (TN) Post-Intelligencer (parispi.net).

Rather than restore, as U.S. Senator Chris Dodd (D-Con) calls it, "the collective confidence in our nation's financial institutions", how about Congress making it a priority to restore citizen confidence in the political process? Or even working towards restoring itself as a branch of the federal Leviathan not inferior to the executive and judicial branches?

Does any sober person believe that we can even approach such goals without a renewed commitment to our state and national constitutions? Isn't that what this blog, named for worthy progenitors, is all about?

--William Barr (Katy, TX) wbarrparis@aol.com

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Thanks to Mr. Barr!