Jonathan Weil gets off a good one here, concluding how ridiculous was bailing out the banks in the first place:
The government has so many conflicting agendas, we may never get satisfactory answers to those questions. All of this is part of the legacy of the unprecedented federal interventions in 2008, as well as a reminder of what a colossal mistake it was in the first place to create Fannie and Freddie with all their privatized profits and socialized losses.
The proper role of government in a free-enterprise system is to police market participants at arm’s length, not join their ranks and choose winners and losers. That’s a line we crossed a long time ago, though. The great outrage isn’t that a federal agency is suing some of these too-big-to-fail banks for damages. It’s that we ever bailed them out at all.
None dare call it fascism, though, not even Jonathan Weil.
