The trillion dollar lesson

The only reason to invest in the stock market is to make a profit. Duh. And conventional business wisdom has it that the best way to make a profit is to insist that regulators get the hell out of the way and allow market forces to do their thing. They’ve said it often enough. We get it. And so does the G.W. Bush administration, in spades.

But the marauding investors want it both ways. When things go wrong, well, their inalienable right to make money requires their government intervene to insure it will happen: the bail-out.

Fine. Sometimes, bail-outs are probably a necessary evil to protect the larger good. Ask the uber-businessman Lee Iacocca.

But there is something horrifically unsettling, duplicitous, ironic and nauseating to the pitiful sight of watching all the deep pocket privateers voting ‘hurray’ with their money when the government calvary charges in to rescue them from their own avarice. With the announcement of the latest government intervention, tax-payer bail-out, upwards of a trillion dollars, the Dow jumped 400 points.

There may never have been better examples for the need for tight government regulations then the past week in the United States.

The marauding degradation of the environment and its ensuring global warming haven’t inspired a curtailment of the corporate right to profit, not a bit. Now, though, maybe the bail-out of corporate greed and the need for ever-greater profits will put the glow back on REGULATIONS as a way of protecting innocent by-standers from the malicious drive-bys of the profit-crazed laissez-fair privateers.

We must rant while we hope.