Just came across this gem about the Wall Street bailout, from Rachel Maddow.What is this Wall Street bailout and how is it being managed?
Still taking shape, still hard to understand. Let’s try a metaphor.
Money is Halloween candy. And those Wall Street bankers are, metaphorically speaking, our six-year-old child, who went out and got more candy than we’ve ever seen or imagined. Trick or treat?
And with all that candy sitting there, we parents -- the taxpayers -- hired a baby sitter to supervise our child. Only instead of hiring a grown up, who wisely fears what happens when six years old do what they like to do best -- eat all the candy all at once -- we instead hired a seven-year-old babysitter: the federal government.
So, what happened? The six-year-old ate more candy than it should have on the seven-year-old’s watch, and got sick all over the carpet. And now that we’re paying and sending home the seven-year-old babysitter, we got her take on this disgusting, huge, mess of a crisis we’re now in... and our seven-year-old babysitter turns to us and says, “Well, the problem here is that you’re now out of candy. You’re going to need more candy.”
And that, roughly, is my layman’s understanding of what just happened to our economy. We left a kid with too much candy, Wall Street and its money, under the supervision of a babysitter who is not all inclined to babysit. And we should have known better, because the babysitter we’ve hired told us explicitly, a generation ago, what it thought of supervision:
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem. [RONALD REAGAN, JANUARY 20, 1981]
Neat. But, if that’s what you think of government, you probably shouldn’t get to run one.