Mind Scalpel

Man, I turn my back for three short months to work on my meson cannon, and look what they’ve done — the world’s hardly worth taking over anymore.  Drives me crazy.

But I must say, the several trillion dollars the world economy has “lost” will all be worth it, if only to prove the prescience of my last post.  Things were nigh-blissful, with a Congress floundering about, passing, at best, absurd non-binding resolutions like commemorating the Kingdom of Bhutan’s participation in the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival (seriously).

And then all hell breaks loose.

Did you ever see the movie “Heat”?  If not, then I recommend it, if only for appreciation of Al Pacino’s character’s interrogation technique.  Essentially, he’d burst into a room, maybe even with a search warrant, grab the guy he wanted to question by the lapels and scream at the guy, practically nose-to-nose, “GIVE ME WHAT I WANT!  GIVE ME WHAT I WANT!!!”  The hapless target would basically crumble in the face of this unexpected onslaught and, indeed, give Pacino’s character whatever he wanted.

In case you haven’t noticed, in this metaphor, Hank Paulson is Al Pacino, and our beloved Congress is the hapless target.

In a paroxysm of utter panic and confusion, Congress did, indeed, in the words of an incredibly intelligent

(and ruggedly attractive) commentator, do something “so screamingly random, irrational and counterproductive that we end[ed] up wishing that it had just stayed the hell asleep and out of our lives.”

To wit, forking over about a trillion dollars worth of our money to one unaccountable guy, who, quite frankly, has no idea what he is doing, so he can lurch from over-leveraged, bad-judgment-saddled company (yes, I’m talking about you, AIG) to uncalculated-risk-philic, insight-proof company, sprinkling a few billion dollars here, a few billion dollars there, in the hope that this will inspire “trust” in the financial system so that people will start lending to others again.

So!  How’s that working out for us?

Not so well, it seems.  The unesteemed Mr. Paulson has admitted that, after acquiring our cash on false pretenses, he arrowed off in a completely unexpected direction, because (essentially) “it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

And now we can’t even find out where the money’s being spent!

What this teaches us is that saving people and companies from their incredibly poor choices is absolutely counterproductive.  For those of you who have bought houses within the past five or ten years, it turns out you have paid artificially high prices, because of the ridiculously easy availability of credit.  So you’re already paying for the housing bubble — in the form of your artificially-inflated mortgage payment.

Now you’re also being asked to bail out the people who acted less prudently than you did, and the people who sliced and diced all their mortgages into collateralized debt obligations, and the people who placed bets on CDOs by buying into credit default swaps, and credit card companies who lent to bad borrowers (say, did you know American Express is now being magically reclassified as a bank?), and soon automobile companies who make cars people don’t want to buy.

So much for small-government Republican Congresscritters!  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, folks.  What you’ve discovered, in this last election, is that you won’t persuade people to vote for you by making Democrat noises — they’ll always go for the real thing.

In the meantime, I need to move my meson cannon.  I’m behind in my payments and the repo guy’s pulling up.

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