I Want My #&@%%@ Money Back, and You Should Too.

I want it back. I did not agree to lend it in the first place. Neither did you. Yet lend it you did. Hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP funds were lent to distressed banks and healthy banks alike. Some of the healthy banks were required to take funds with a gun to their heads so that the weaker banks would not feel bad about themselves, I suppose.

Now that those same banks are attempting to pay it back, the administration seems to think they shouldn’t. Whoa, they say, slow down, take a deep breath, we don’t need the money back that badly.

What? We don’t want it back? With a deficit the size of Everest we want the taxpayer’s money to remain in the hands of private bankers that do not want or need it?

Kurt Vonnegut provides us at least one clue to help find an answer.  As in the world he created for Harrison Bergeron, our current political class apparently wants a world filled with equal mediocrity. No bank, or person, should appear to be superior to any other. Therefore, those banks with superior management, or superior balance sheets, or better strategies should be required to carry a lodestone so that the inferior banks look equal. Everybody then watches Keith Olbermann, The Daily Show, blames Bush and forgets that their money is being wasted. They also forget that the U.S. even has a constitution. Cut to commercial.

What else in recent memory gives the administration so much control of private enterprise? If the money is repaid the political class loses the power to control the private sector, the holy grail of both parties, but especially the left. If all this does not sound familiar, it should. These practices have been in use by organized crime for hundreds of years. Loan sharking and protection rackets are the fifth and sixth oldest professions.

Do you think that James Wilson would even recognize the nation he helped found? How about Jefferson or Adams? I will leave it to you to decide the real reasons for the government’s pathological misuse of your children’s money.

 

Best,

Lazy Jack

 

© Edward Hunter and Thanks for the Laughs, 2009