A trillion dollars.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. A hell of a lot. Yet, that's what they're supposing it'll take to bail out the financial markets.

If you're a fiscal conservative, you're probably wondering if everyone in the government has lost their damned minds. I know I'm wondering about it.

When I was in college studying things like accounting and economics and the free markets, I was taught that great risks were often rewarded with great profits. That the more risky the business, the greater the opportunity for profit. But on the down side, you also had a greater opportunity to fail. To go broke. That risk of going broke should be on the back of every manager's mind.

Back in the dim dark ages of my memory, the early 1990's, I went bankrupt. I tried to grab some quick profits, failed, and went belly-up. It was a humiliating experience but it taught me a great lesson.

That's a lesson that Freddie, and Fannie, and AIG won't have to learn. It's a lesson that they should have been allowed to learn.

And, the United States Government should not care one whit, not one copper penny's worth. The managers at Freddie, Fannie, Lehman, Bear, and AIG went on a greed trip. They made bad loans, loans that didn't have a chance of being repaid. They are holding bad paper that has no worth, yet they're trying to balance their books with the bad paper. The market realized that and suddenly, they couldn't move bad paper and they went belly up. That's tough, that's tough, that's the way the market works. They had the opportunity for great profits and they had the opportunity for great failure. They should be allowed to fail magnificently. The market would recover, and life would go on.

And now the government decides to bail them out. We've just become a socialist nation. They ought to go ahead and nationalize the markets, make all assets belong to the government. Without the ability to fail, there is no capitalism, and George Bush just approved the death of the free market. I spit in his general direction.