Too Big To Fail? Too Big For A Government Takeover.

26 Oct, 2009 by John Hawkins

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The Marxist appetite that has helped drive the Left to attempt to permanently embed itself in the nation’s banking and auto industries has yet to be whetted:

A senior administration official said on Sunday that after extensive consultations with Treasury Department officials, Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would introduce legislation as early as this week. The measure would make it easier for the government to seize control of troubled financial institutions, throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by the institution.

The official said the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, was planning to endorse the changes in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday.

…Some regulators and economists in recent weeks have suggested that the administration’s plan does not go far enough. They say that the government should consider breaking up the biggest banks and investment firms long before they fail, or at least impose strict limits on their trading activities – steps that the administration continues to reject.

Simply put: Any firm that is genuinely “too big to fail” should be treated as a monopoly and broken up. Even Milton Friedman, the ultimate free market economist, believed in breaking up monopolies.

Normally, Democrats would love the idea of breaking up companies that are “too big to fail,” but things have changed, you see. Now, they see a bigger and better opportunity: they can actually take over these companies and run them as they see fit.

So, you have puffed up politicians, who have spent their whole lives ordering obsequious aides around and taking obsessive pride in the fact that they know political jargon, loving the idea of stepping in at the top in a business.

They don’t have to be the guy on the plant floor who works his way up to VP after 25 years of busting his hump, oh no, not them. They want to start at the top, as CEO, where everyone will be “shocked at their brilliance” and think that it’s tragic that such a budding Lee Iacocca managed to escape business for politics. That’s how they envision it, anyway.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, there are a half dozen fairly new assistant managers on the planet floor who know more about the business and would do a better job of running it than 95% of the stuffed shirts in Congress ever could.

Here’s the honest-to-God truth: most members of Congress are hopelessly unqualified to run a business. They don’t have the real world experience, the knowledge, the leadership abilities, or the capability to competently handle a large firm. Moreover, they’re not ever going to have those abilities because they’re too busy slipping dung Beetle earmarks into 1500 page bills that no one bothers to read.

The more power Congress gives itself over the free market, the more capital will be wasted, the more jobs will be lost, and the slower our economy will grow.

That’s why the LAST THING we need in this country is to make it easier for Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and the rest of the cretins on Capitol Hill to take over and loot more companies.