Dear George,
Freedom! How the word has matured over the years. Once it meant freedom of speech, of religion, of the press, and all that other stuff. As these freedoms fell victim to a new age of paranoia and anxiety, one shone forth—the inalienable right of the corporation to maximize its profits. The torch that illuminates this new freedom is deregulation.
We are speaking of the freedom to be driven by the invisible hand of the market. But, and this is a big but Big Guy, this hand is a civilized and refined hand. Where the traditional hand smushed corporate incompetence, the new and improved hand gives inept corporations a hand job in the form of a government bailout.
No longer will corporate stupidity be punished by an unfeeling marketplace. This was made obvious in 1984 when the Continental Bank of Illinois was on the verge of going bust because of some bad loans. The bank has so many tentacles looped around so many other institutions, it would have taken them with it when it folded. So the Treasury Department and the FDIC came up with a $4 billions bailout package, and deregulation lite was born.
This lesson was not lost on the Savings and Loan institutions who were making bad loans as fast as they could count out the money. It cost the American taxpayer $250 billion to pull them back from the brink of insolvency.
What a wonderful example of free enterprise at work! If you are big enough, it doesn’t matter how screwed up you are. Some malcontents feel that if taxpayer money is being used to bail out corporate incompetence, there should be some sort of regulation in place. This is pure leftie nonsense! The only regulation we need is the invisible hand of the market.
If you’d like to visualize the invisible hand of the market, do the following: Place your elbow on a flat surface with your forearm perpendicular to the surface; make a fist; extend your middle finger heavenward. There you have it, the invisible hand of the market. Long may it continue to guide and inspire us.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
9:28:01 PM 
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