Tom Piatak

September 19, 2008

Now that Henry Paulson has decided that the taxpayers will pay billions and billions of dollars to relieve Wall Street of the bad debt it can no longer successfully peddle, neoconservatives are lining up to salute.  Here is David Frum, giving a “shout out” to Barney Frank for being “prescient” enough to call for Uncle Sam to pick up the tab for all the bad subprime mortgages and investment vehicles based on the bad loans that should never have been given, and would never have been given when prudent and reasonable people were responsible for home mortgages.  But Frum is careful to retain some free market credibility by saying that this massive government intervention is “not like bailing out an automobile maker (a bad idea).”

Really?  Chrysler repaid the government loans it got, and went on keeping tens of thousands of Americans in gainful employment.  Even today, the Big Three are vital to the economic health of many American communities, particularly in the part of America I have always called home.  Frum’s view is that the industrial Midwest can go to hell, but that Wall Street must always be cosseted.  I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.