Why should banks have all the fun?

First, the bailout came for banks. Then government started bailing out troubled industries. Now, they're nationalizing helping floundering individual businesses.

Frantically trying to stop the bleeding on Wall Street, the Federal Reserve took a first-time step Tuesday to get cash directly to businesses and hinted that interest rates could come down soon. Stocks continued their free fall anyway and hit new five-year lows.

The central bank invoked emergency powers to lend money to companies outside the financial sector and buy up mounds of commercial paper, the short-term debt that firms use to pay for everyday expenses like salaries and supplies.

The Fed, which has only loaned money to banks before, made the move as the gravest financial crisis in decades wore on and concern spread around the world.

But you know, we keep hearing the economy is based on consumer spending, and all those overspent consumers are feeling a little pinched in the wallet these days, now that the chickens have come home to roost. Why not just go for broke (literally) and loan all of THEM public money as well?? (...maybe I shouldn't go giving Uncle Sam ideas...)

There's really no difference between taking tax money and giving it to corporations and giving it to other taxpayers. It's all a redistribution of wealth by force, and skews the workings of a free market -- something we don't have, as is all too apparent today.

This massive expansion of "emergency government power" should make any student of the 1920s and 1930s very apprehensive. Far from ending the Depression, there's substantial evidence Uncle Sam's meddling around prolonged the misery. By years.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

Oops.

Batten down the hatches, everyone... this is going to be bumpy.

**
Update: well, that's what I get for giving Uncle Sam ideas. Looks like our government will soon own most of the banks, the businesses, and now the houses. This is a free society?