All quiet on the western front

I'm not hearing or reading much about the bailout bill, except a report or two that it will take a long time to see positive results -- of course it will.

Is everyone in shock? Is it over and time to go on to something else? Does anyone know what to say?

I would like to make a prediction. After time has passed and objective thinkers study this situation, it will be determined that the bailout was not needed and resulted from politicians seeing an opportunity to seize more power over the economy because they no longer trusted capitalism.

McCain had a golden opportunity to be a leader and stand up to this hurried intervention. He could have called for meetings of the nation's top economists and business leaders to help devise a plan to fix the fundamental problems of our mixed economy. This is a problem of fundamentals, of fundamentals solutions not being applied.

Peter Senge would have been a good man to consult -- he wrote briliiantly in The Fifth Discipline about fundamental and symptomatic solutions regarding fundamental and symptomatic problems. Until we accept that government intervention in our economy will continue to create crisis after crisis, we will be perpetually applying symptomatic solutions with no positive change. 

McCain was right, the fundamentals of our economy are fine -- the productive forces that lie underneath all the political engineering are waiting to be unleashed -- and have been since the creation of this country. The problem is we have gone so far with statism that not many can see a country without income tax, without public education, without myriad regulations, without all the departments to control transportation and welfare and resources and energy and forests and everything else they can control.

A free country would generate a spontaneous order of progress so much greater than the puny designs of politicians that it's amazing we can't see it. Oh, that's silly, they would say -- the world is too complex for such simplistic, risky ideas.

No, the world is too complex for designers. Look around you, then consider the designers..