George Will

WASHINGTON -- We are waist deep in evasions because one cannot talk sense about the cultural roots of the financial crisis without transgressing this cardinal principle of politics: Never shall be heard a discouraging word about the public.

Let's begin by making sure that the reader knows that we will be tarring the citizenry for the current crisis in economics.

Concerning which, a timeless political trope is: Government should budget the way households supposedly do, conforming outlays to income. But the crisis came partly because so many households decided that it would be jolly fun to budget the way government does, hitching outlays to appetites.

I'll mention in passing my distaste for deficit spending. Now that I have your attention, I'm going to proceed to the central argument of my column: rash use of credit by American families is fundamentally at fault for the current problems in the economy.

Beneath Americans' perfunctory disapproval of government deficits lurks an inconvenient truth: They enjoy deficits, by which they are charged less than a dollar for a dollar's worth of government. Conservatives participate in this, even though deficits fuel government's growth by obscuring its cost.

Most Americans are too naive and uneducated to realize why they believe what politicians of all stripes hammer away at in every single election. Indeed, they are just as guilty as the government that they allow to run rampant. I'd also like to mention that I still firmly stand with Reagan. The government is the problem, not the solution.

The people can emulate the government because credit has been democratized. Democratization of everything is supposedly an unquestionable good, but a blizzard of credit cards (1.5 billion of them, nine per cardholder), subsidized loans and cheap money has separated the pleasure of purchasing from the pain of paying. Furthermore, the entitlement mentality fostered by the welfare state includes a felt entitlement to a standard of living untethered from savings.

Every evil perpetrated by the citizenry can be blamed on the "welfare state". Watch as I carefully create a connection between the availabilty of credit, which has little to do with the government beyond the LACK of regulations in place to control the corporations that provide it, and the conservative standby of unearned entitlement. Pay no attention to the fact that there is little more than a tenuous correlation here.

Populism flatters the people, contrasting their virtue with the alleged vices of some minority -- in other times, Jews or railroad owners or hard money advocates; today, the villain is "Wall Street greed," which is contrasted with the supposed sobriety of "Main Street." When people on Main Street misbehave by, say, buying houses for more than they can afford to pay, they blame the wily knaves who made them do it, such as the "nimble" Babbitt.

Now, I'm really going to go over the top. Populism, i.e. a poltical movement defined by and beholden to the will of the populace, typically the working and middle classes, is about setting up a straw man to bash to keep the masses free of any hint of blame. Let's throw the Jews in there for color. I know it seems a bit forward, but the position I am espousing here is something along the lines of Daddy Knows Best. I'm not going to let a trace of blame for the financial instutions that shopped these loans aggressively and took advantage of longstanding respect and reputation enter my arguement.

Knowing that heat breeds haste, errors and unintended consequences, George Washington praised the Senate as the saucer into which legislation is poured to cool. In this crisis, however, the House of Representatives has performed that function. Republicans, especially, slowed a Gadarene rush to ratify the deeply flawed original bailout legislation.

Just a bit of flavor now. Founding Fathers and all that.

Voting against the bill -- against putting taxpayers' money at risk in order to clean up a mess that some people got rich by making -- was easy, but not necessarily wrong. The $700 billion figure exaggerated the plan's probable cost, but accurately measured something worse -- the enormous enlargement of government's power.

My objections to this bill have little to do with the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

So the joint declaration by John McCain and Barack Obama that Congress should "rise above politics" was mere gas. The legislation touched elemental questions -- the meaning of justice, the parameters of freedom and the proper functions of government. Democrats charge that the crisis is market failure arising from an insufficiency of government, in the form of regulation. Well.

We need to conflate John McCain's incohernt, irrational approach to this particular game with Barack Obama's, regardless of the lack of similarity. Political expediency will not be a factor we discuss.

Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the first bailout of Chrysler (it, Ford and GM are about to get $25 billion in subsidized loans). Might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?

I need an example, somewhere to fix the blame. Here's one I can bend to fit this situation. We leave tacet any mention of the S&L recovery, and the housing fix of early last century.

Suppose there had never been implicit government backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Better yet, suppose those two had never existed -- there was homeownership before them, just not at a level that the government thought proper. Absent Fannie and Freddie -- absent government manipulation of the housing market -- would there have developed the excessive diversion of capital into the housing stock?

Again, let me stab at the crux. The government's size and involvement in American life is improper when it involves actions on the level of the citizenry. This broad brush simultaneously paints homeowners and the government. Little mention is to be made of corporate exploitation, as the market rules all and acts naturally.

The rising generation of thoughtful Republicans was represented on both sides of Monday's vote. Virginia's Eric Cantor, 45, and Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, 38, supported the legislation because they had helped to achieve substantial improvements in it, such as requiring financial institutions to help finance their bailout, giving the Treasury potentially valuable equity in firms revived by public funds, and eliminating a slush fund for Democratic activists. Texas' Jeb Hensarling, 51, and Indiana's Mike Pence, 49, voted against what they considered a rescue model fundamentally flawed because (in Hensarling's words) it "could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government."

Contortionists are no more flexible than me. I laud Republicans on both sides of the vote. Some are fighting the evil, federalist Democrats. Some are fighting the evil federalist government. All hail Repubicans, the leaders of tomorrow. I am highly educated, and quite aware of the level and type of government involvement in regulating and controlling the financial elements of foreign economies, but I have a drum to beat.

It is potentially catastrophic that this crisis comes in the context of a closely contested election and a collapse of presidential authority. Congress should disconnect from a public that cannot be blamed for being more furious about than comprehending of this opaque debacle. The public wanted catharsis, and respect for its center-right principles, and got both with Monday's House vote. It still needs protection against obliteration of the financial system.

Let me close by indicating my support for Presidential authority, perhaps a nod to the unitary executive theory. The public is ignorant and angry, but to be forgiven for raging along the paths that its Republican virtues lay out. The solution should lie with those who know better. Republik Uber Alles.

To clarify, my analysis of Will's column, which is in bold, is not intended to absolve the public of any blame for the current crisis, but I find offensive the notion that the free market acts instinctively and only reacts to situations that the people/government create.