I am worried about this bailout.

Not just the potential abandonment of the principle that in a free market, companies that make dumb decisions must be free to fail. That’s troublesome, but it’s not like we’ve been honoring free market principles consistently in this country in the last twenty years.

I am reminded of my time at Microsoft, in the long long ago, when I was a junior software development engineer on Microsoft Bob, MS’ ill-fated attempt to create Windows with a human face. Not long after I had joined the team, there was a crisis owing to Bob 1.0’s poor sales – the rumor mill said that the project was going to be canceled, that we would all be out on the street, etc. We had a team meeting (perhaps 40 people) to brainstorm what to do, but when we arrived at the meeting, it turned out that our senior management team – not present at the meeting, and represented by their minions – had already decided what to do. They were going to revise our spec for Bob 2.0 (the project we were working on) so that we could get it done better, quicker, cheaper – all via magic, apparently – and that was going to solve everything and instantly create a huge market for our dog of a product. Although all the previous decisions this team had made had resulted in a steaming pile of fail, they were on the job this time. Our management team was there for us. They were On The Ball.

I remember raising my hand and asking a question that, I am sure, did my Microsoft career no good, but which had a number of the developers nodding their heads. I said “So what you’re saying is, the people whose plans and ideas got us into this mess in the first place, are the same people who have a plan to get us out?”

Perhaps the world will end if we don’t do this bailout. Certainly, a huge contraction of the economy is something that we should avoid if at all possible. But I’m not really sure why letting some incompetent lenders go out of business is going to cause a bigger contraction than taxing the bejeesus out of all of us would.

And I would feel a lot better about the whole thing if the people saying they’re going to save us, weren’t the exact same people who fouled it up in the first place.