I’m just about through with the people in Washington, D.C. and all those who share their mentality.

Frankly, my dear, I no longer give a damn. My short term goals are to keep putting food on the table and gas in the tank so I can get to and from work. My long term goals are to watch the system collapse under its own sheer hubris and criminal arrogance.

The more Congress examines the Bush administration’s bailout plan, the hazier its outcome gets. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing Tuesday, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle complained of being rushed to pass legislation or else risk financial meltdown.

“The secretary and the administration need to know that what they have sent to us is not acceptable,” says Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn. The committee’s top Republican, Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, says he’s concerned about its cost and whether it will even work.

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.”

Wow. If it wants to see a bailout bill passed soon, the administration’s going to have to come up with some hard answers to hard questions. Public support for it already seems to be waning. According to a Rasmussen Reports poll released Tuesday, 44% of those surveyed oppose the administration’s plan, up from 37% Monday.

If only this was a joke. Sadly, it isn’t. The money is just made up at the whim of Congress. It’s just binary data that holds value based on the faith of Americans. Americans are losing faith in the system, and the system is responding by losing value. The end result of this process should be obvious - a breakdown. Possibly a minor breakdown. Possibly a catastrophic train wreck. That remains to be seen.

All I am certain of is that more legislation is not the answer. More rules won’t help. More oversight is not a long term solution to the problem of the creation of 700 billion faith based electrons.

Government created the financial market climate responsible for the risky loans that should never have been given. Yet government has now appointed itself the savior that will rescue us from bad decisions made by government. How this guy can be so far off base is amazing.

Self-reliance. Individual responsibility. A faith in free markets and a belief that people should have the opportunity to fail or succeed on the basis of their hard work and ingenuity. These are qualities that have been as central to the national identity as they have been to the American economic model.

Which is why it is so extraordinary that the government now finds itself hip-deep in the direct management of the financial system, rescuing four of the country’s biggest financial institutions — Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and now Lehman Brothers — from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments.

This unprecedented intrusion of government is coming in the waning days of the administration of a Republican president who made privatization, deregulation and a faith in free markets the centerpiece of his economic policies and of his political agenda.

In case you don’t know it Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by the federal government.

In recent months, the nation’s two largest mortgage finance lenders have come under increasing scrutiny at the hands of Congress, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Federal National Mortgage Association, nicknamed Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, nicknamed Freddie Mac, have operated since 1968 as government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). This means that, although the two companies are privately owned and operated by shareholders, they are protected financially by the support of the Federal Government. These government protections include access to a line of credit through the U.S. Treasury, exemption from state and local income taxes and exemption from SEC oversight. A recent accounting scandal at Freddie Mac that resulted in the replacement of three of the company’s top executives has led to mounting concerns over the privileged status these GSEs enjoy in the marketplace.

Let’s say your daughter got raped. Would you hire the rapist to provide your daughter therapy? That’s as silly as bringing in the federal government to fix the problems it created by allowing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to make irresponsible loans under the protection of law.

Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The collapse of the national housing market in the wake of the Great Depression discouraged private lenders from investing in home loans. Fannie Mae was established in order to provide local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages in an attempt to raise levels of home ownership and the availability of affordable housing.

Initially, Fannie Mae operated like a national savings and loan, allowing local banks to charge low interest rates on mortgages for the benefit of the home buyer. This lead to the development of what is now known as the secondary mortgage market. Within the secondary mortgage market, companies such as Fannie Mae are able to borrow money from foreign investors at low interest rates because of the financial support that they receive from the U.S. Government. It is this ability to borrow at low rates that allows Fannie Mae to provide fixed interest rate mortgages with low down payments to home buyers. Fannie Mae makes a profit from the difference between the interest rates homeowners pay and foreign lenders charge.

Let me be bold. If this cycle of hiring the problem creator to manage the problem continues, foreign armies will one day arrive here to collect the debts we are unable to repay.

Meanwhile a retard named Steven Pearlstein prattles on about free markets with nary a glimmer of understanding.

If these actions had been taken in Moscow, Paris, Beijing or even Brasilia, they would have seemed merely confirmation of long-standing socialist instincts and traditions. But in Washington, they are revolutionary. As with the Great Depression, it has taken a full-blown financial crisis to shake the faith that free markets will always deliver better outcomes than politicians and bureaucrats.

What free market you moron? Franklin Delano Roosevelt set the stage for the socialist controlled market in 1938! The current conditions are the direct result of government interference in free markets. Your advocating more government interference is akin fighting a fire by pouring fuel on it. What the hell is wrong with you people?

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we are a communist nation. As such, no one is free to fail. No one is free to succeed either. In fact, no one is free at all. We are all pawns in the hands of the politicians - those proud men and women who tell us that they take our money for our own good. Since this country wasn’t originally intended to become a communist nation, these schemers still mostly have to steal our money on weekends.

At irregular intervals, the weekend also brings news of the latest installment of the incremental nationalization of the investment markets. This began several months ago with the federally backed and brokered buy-out of Bear Stearns. Over the most recent weekend this process reached an important milestone when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were transformed from fascist entities — that is, “public-private” partnerships — into fully realized, federally owned socialist organs.

Legendary investor Jim Rogers, as usual, speaks the unalloyed truth when he observes that the Fannie/Freddie bailout demonstrates that “America is more socialist than China right now,” with government redistributing wealth for the benefit of the politically connected super-rich. (That’s how socialism always works in practice, of course.)

Once again, to the surprise of nobody who has been paying attention, this development was praised by the presidential candidates from both wings of the Ruling Party. And as with all such socialist undertakings, the very first priority of the officials who seized Fannie and Freddie was to assure the apparatchiks that their jobs were secure.

Security only lasts until there are more parasites feeding on the hosts than the hosts can or are willing to support. Once that tipping point is reached both host and parasite suffer, and one or both die. America’s current political class on both sides of the aisle have made their careers on fostering the mentality of parasitism. No matter how useless you are to society, no matter how little you contribute, no matter how poor the decisions you make someone else will always be there to bail you out.

Unfortunately that is how America, the land of the free and the home of the brave (gag) have arrived at a national debt so staggering that it cannot be comprehended, even by the thieves who were instrumental in creating it. We are reaching the end of the balance between the producers and the consumers. Each massive bailout defrauds the American taxpayer and inexorably speeds up the slow decline of the behemoth known as American government. When the flames are licking their way up the walls of the Capitol building don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

TANSTAAFL

You may not have noticed, but America is in trouble. Our credit is overextended. Our military is overextended. Our welcome in the rest of the world is overextended. Civil liberties are disappearing and it’s only a matter of time before people start vanishing too. As a group, we’re getting fatter and lazier. Our political system is broken to the point that many people don’t think it can be repaired. There are not enough significant differences between the two parties in charge to matter in the long run. Both of them are driving us inexorably towards a point where we’ll either be a giant modern day version of a plantation or, depending where the technology goes, the majority of us will be converted into Solyent Green to feed the elite class. Anyone outside the two-party umbrella is marginalized or criminalized or simply ignored, depending what’s most expedient.

Jack Cafferty gets at least half of the picture.

It’s more than symbolic that when a million Americans are losing their homes to foreclosure, the Republican candidate for president has lost track of his holdings.

McCain surrounds himself with people like former Republican Sen. Phil Gramm who called America a “nation of whiners” and said we are only suffering a “mental recession.”

That’s the same problem the Republican Party has. It has lost track of what it used to stand for: small government, a disciplined fiscal policy, integrity.

In a way, the perfect storm of a rapidly changing population — old white people aren’t going to be in the majority very much longer (and isn’t that who most of the Republicans are?) — has combined with the total abdication of principles, Republican or otherwise, of arguably the worst president in the nation’s history to mark the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as we know it.

The Democrats will be in charge of both the legislative and executive branches soon. This means they’ll have some opportunities to take over the judicial again. Things will change, as they always do, but not for the better. Government doesn’t offer inspiration. Government isn’t good at hope. Government has no idea what creative vision is and it doesn’t do invention well. When all you offer as a solution to every problem is more government, then the overriding problem becomes how much government you have. We’ve reached that point.

Instead we can expect the police state to continue to grow. Concepts like zero tolerance, a “war on terror,” the continual decline of individual choices, more monitoring technologies and the ongoing dumbing down of citizens as the rise of the nanny state continues. That’s what I predict when the ball passes from the Republicans to the Democrats.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of the state in my life. I’m interested in the limits on legitimate functions and how far those should extend. For more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about how the state’s role is bigger than I am comfortable with. I’ve concluded that the state itself takes too much and gives too little. Thinking about how to fix that could easily consume the next century of my life.

Luckily, I’m not alone in thinking about the role of the state. Don Boudreaux over at Cafe Hayek is also thinking about government. The cleverly titled Your Dog Does Not Own Your House is well worth reading.

Even if we stipulate, for purposes of argument, that the state is the only possible, or the best possible, supplier of protection against violence and the best possible supplier of dispute-resolution services, society as we know it would nevertheless collapse were it not for farmers, tailors, home-builders, physicians, lawyers, stockbrokers, engineers,….. the list is long.

Get rid of any of these producer groups and people die by the millions.  And yet, no one proclaims that “Justice is whatever farmers claim it to be” or “Because society cannot exist if people aren’t clothed, then weavers and tailors are the foundation of society.”

What we are thinking about here is how government gets things done. Most of the interactions you have probably had in your lifetime with a government agency have been either banal or mediocre. Think of waiting in line for a driver’s license. For me, the citizenship process is one long blur of answering silly questions and waiting in uncomfortable chairs to be analyzed and judged by people following lists of arbitrary criteria. Someone else may think of an IRS audit.

Few people who don’t work for government think of government without a sense of apprehension, or fear, or mistrust. There are exceptions of course. Sometimes government does good things. Every now and then those good things are conceptions dreamed up by a politician. By and large though, government rules by the gun. That’s what it always comes down to. Government doesn’t create, it distributes after taking a cut.

No politician creates prosperity. It is created by countless entrepreneurs, businesses and workers competing and cooperating within markets. For government to avoid obstructing these markets is indeed desirable — but it does not create the resulting prosperity. To insist otherwise would be no different from my insisting that I, as a driver who did not run over Ms. Jones as she walked back from the supermarket, am responsible for the tasty dinner she cooked that evening for her family.

Whenever that rarest of creatures — an honorable politician — manages to loosen some part of government’s grip on us, he deserves acclaim. Even he, however, doesn’t deserve credit for whatever economic growth and cultural flourishing follow. Such credit properly belongs to the many persons who create, innovate, take risks, save and work to produce what consumers want.

The idea that government deserves credit for all of the benefits produced by freedom is a special case of the deification of government. When deified, government is mistakenly seen as responsible for all good that happens in society — with all bad things being blamed on devils who, of course, must be banished by government.

Most people, of course, don’t realize this about government. If they did, I wouldn’t have to shut off all the news channels after becoming physically sickened listening to all the lies, false promises and grand schemes coming out of the mouths of the politicians. All I hear is the sound of a gun being cocked and then pointed at my head.