Publication Date 9-25-08

I suppose the country needed to bail out the big boys on Wall Street. I guess it'd be a bad thing if all the major banking firms in the country looked like week-old road kill.

I don't like it though. It makes me mad, and I'm not the only one. I've been conducting a poll, trying to figure out just how many people aren't mad. I thought about forty would be close, my son guessed maybe a hundred, my daughter thought four.

She may be right. Four people of the three hundred and five million in the entire United States are feeling good about the taxpayers sending $500 billion (or maybe it's $700 billion – I've kinda lost count) to the folks on Wall Street. And it's possible those four are in comas.

Even the people slated to get the money should be grumpy. After all, they're the same ones who've been telling us for a couple of decades that the government is the problem, that all we need to do is get the government out of the way and we could just settle back and watch their smoke. We certainly saw plenty of smoke – we just didn't know it was from burning bearings. And the people who did know weren't talking.

I confess to not knowing a lot about the banking biz. Throughout my life, if I needed something expensive, like a combine or a quarter of land, I'd go to my bank. After I explained how I was going to pay the money back, they'd usually give me some. I'd give up sleeping and double my consumption of antacids until I paid the loan back, my banker would give me a pen for Christmas, and everyone was happy.

Evidently they do banking differently on Wall Street.

This past week I talked to two different bankers trying to get a handle on just what happened. One looked at me in astonishment and said, “Greed.” And then he changed the subject to pheasant hunting.

The other one said, “You shouldn't pay bonuses to loan officers to encourage them to make loans to people who can't pay the money back.”

Okay, maybe the banking business isn't as complicated as I thought it was. I mean, I thought it couldn't be simple for an industry full of guys in nice suits to throw away a trillion dollars or so, but I guess I was wrong. Just mix a dose of greed that would embarrass Louis XIV with a dash of unprincipled arrogance, stir in some politicians who sincerely believe the wealthiest people know what's best, and it was easy to predict that the folks who live paycheck to paycheck were going to be handed a mop and told to clean up the mess.

I will say one thing. This really should put an end to the deregulation of big business, that whole “we know best” nonsense. The big financial companies have shown the restraint and caution of a heroin addict. To me, they look like a 16-year-old who begged and pleaded to be given the keys to the family car, and then brought it home at dawn with a keg smashed through the rear window and a family of moose stuck in the grill.

Given the circumstances, I guess we have to bail them out for the good of the country, but I hope we can all agree they should be grounded for a long, long time.

Copyright 2008 Brent Olson www.independentlyspeaking.com