Bailout babble.

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Financial-services firms are getting taxpayers' money to the tune of $700 billion. And then they're going to get more.

Why? Because some people took out mortgages that were designed, by the banks that supplied them, to be, eventually, unaffordable and ended up being unable to afford them. Stupid poor people with their American Dream.

Banks were hemorrhaging money. To get the red ink off their books they, in very basic terms, sold these "bad" or "toxic" mortgages (in the parlance of our times) to financial-services firms. When these firms' books started gushing red like the elevator in "The Shining," they created an entirely new financial instrument that allowed them to sell bits and pieces of mortgages and on into things I won't discuss because I can't understand them.

Everything fell apart. So the Bush Administration and Congress acted with the speed of Hurricane Katrina to pass the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) -- $700 billion for the financial sector.

...And?

We're in Great Depression II. TARP provides the best example yet that for a half-century the US economic system has been subsidized capitalism. Incompetence will be rewarded or punished based on a person or business's wealth. The less-fortunate must rely on governments that pass special laws to make charging 400 percent interest legal (payday loans).

To survive, 99.9 percent of us will have to work a lot harder, longer, and smarter at jobs we'll consider ourselves lucky to have or manage to get. These jobs will pay, adjusting for inflation, less than they did in 1980.

0.1 percent of Americans, their real wages having grown 497 percent in the past decades to an average of $1.7 million, will continue to invent new ways to screw the other 99.9 percent, cheek-to-cheek with a government as immoral and unethical as they are.
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George Will: un-smart. (Edition 1)

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(This is the first post in a series that will deal with the writings and general thoughts George Will is un-smart enough to make public.)

Re: Newsweek's "Last Word," December 1, 2008 edition:

Will states that "the doctrine of 'nondelegation'"... is "a necessary concomitant of the Constitution's separation of powers, [and] usually concerns improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch."

Yet Will did not, and does not, believe nondelegation to be important concerning the "improper delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch." He has never had a problem with what has come to be called W.'s Imperial Presidency.

Will only is concerned with the unconstitutionality of the recent bailouts, and supports his view with an idea he lauds in this instance, and shuns in most others.

Onward: TARP "has made Treasury Department bureaucrats into legislators; or perhaps it has made Secretary Hank Paulson the fourth branch of government."

No. Congress still is the only branch of government that can create and pass legislation, even if it is the kind of legislation Paulson and the Treasury explicitly desired.

And the bailout measure was full of enticements that bought representatives' pro-votes.

These weren't in Paulson's plan. They got there because the bailout had to go through Congress' colon.

So I'm still only counting three branches of government.

Will spouts nonsense for a bit, then this: "Socialism is not merely susceptible to corruption; it is corruption—the allocation of wealth and opportunity by political favoritism. Under democratic socialism, such favoritism is then rewarded by financial support, by those favored, of the dispensers of favors."

Will's point must be that W. ran a socialist regime. W. made his friends and supporters rich and filled his government with them, from Heckuva Job Brownie to Halliburton to giving any and every government job to Republicans (being a Repub. was a prerequisite for service, with Dems being weeded out by design in application processes).

The column's second-to-last paragraph is this:

"It serves the left's agenda of expanding the scope of politics by multiplying the forms of dependency on government. Hence liberalism's enthusiasm for enriching the menu of entitlements; hence liberalism's promotion of equality by making more groups and entities equally dependent on government."

All of this is opinion (fine in an opinion piece) unsubstantiated by any facts. It's simply the warped way Will views "liberalism."

Liberalism is (m-w.com):

1: the quality or state of being liberal2 aoften capitalized : a movement in modern Protestantism emphasizing intellectual liberty and the spiritual and ethical content of Christianity b: a theory in economics emphasizing individual freedom from restraint and usually based on free competition, the self-regulating market, and the gold standard c: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties d: capitalized: the principles and policies of a Liberal party.

And Will believes liberalism to be self-evidently evil.

Which allows one to argue rather easily that Will, rather, is evil. And also shows that he doesn't have a proper conception of what he writes about (since he believes the US is a Christian nation and loves nothing more than to profess his adoration for individual freedom, free competition, and especially the self-regulating market).
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Bailout

Corporate bailout: 700 billion dollars.

Population of the United States: 301,139,947 (July 2007 estimate).

Seven hundred billion (dollars) divided by the population of the US = $2,324.50.