Unless there is some miracle and Congress gets a backbone at the prodding of an angry American people, in all likelihood some form of the Bush bailout is going to become law soon. Please note that there is still time to register your displeasure with your Congressional representative and Senator, so please do so here.

Naturally, the bureaucrats in Washington, and especially in the Treasury Department where genius intellects like Henry Paulson are hard at work, always carefully crunch the numbers before putting together any serious proposals that will ultimately change the American way of life. Like, for instance, the $700 billion bailout proposal now before Congress. Of course, that was carefully and thoughtfully constructed after much deliberation and thought, right?

Not exactly. From Forbes:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number." 

Please read that again. 

That's right, they pulled a number out of thin air. This is the kind of "expertise" that is currently running the country. Economics students in a sophomore-level class in money and banking could do a far better job than the functionaries at the Treasury Department have done in coming up with the $700 billion figure.

The fact is, central planning systems (granted, the Treasury does not seem smart enough to have come up with something as elaborate as a system), can never perform accurate economic calculations. That is something that can only happen in a free market economy.

This is just one more reason to oppose the bailout (as if planning to turn the Treasury Secretary into a financial dictator and stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers, were not reason enough).

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