How Free-market capitalists clean up their disaster

In a Washington Post article of today's date entitled Credit crisis triggers unprecedented response, the paper discusses the supposed conflict that free-market capitalists such as Treasury Secy Paulson are feeling as they are "forced" by circumstances to take "unprecedented" action to shore up the ailing credit system.

But the article misses the point entirely, as do the free-market capitalists who got us into this mess in the first place. What Secy. Paulson and Ben Bernake are doing to "fix" the crisis is simply strong-arming the taxpayer into underwriting all the bad debt floating around the economy so that the large, sleazy institutions whose rapacious lending practices caused the problems will be protected from the conequences of their actions.

Nowhere in the article nor in the actions and speeches of the people involved do we hear plans to seriously re-regulate and/or enforce regulation of the institutions and the practices that have arguably led to the great depression of 2008, 2009, 2010, who knows how long!

The approach by the Fed and Treasury is completely consistent with the behavior of free-market capitalism: de-regulate everything so that cowboy capitalists can get rich and then, when the imbalances that result are too large to ignore, get the poor taxpayer -- the majority of whom are middle class and who, I point out, have already suffered financially from the scams of these cowboys -- to pay the bill.

It would be hilarious if it weren't so sad.