Bailout?

Don Surber:

The Dow is down 1,400 points since the House passed the bailout.

Way to toss an anchor to an economy that was taking on a little water.

But who the hell knows? These economies are such a complicated and indecipherable mix of markets and government regulations and interventions, that we'll probably never be able to figure out what should have been done, or not done.

There is an old joke about the chief Soviet economist who was asked to describe his socialist dream world. He answered that it would be one where every country in the world would be run according to socialist economic planning, except New Zealand. Why not New Zealand? "Well, one market economy is needed so we can know where to set the prices of things."

The current mess makes me wish there was one economy someplace on the planet that ran according to pure market principles. I was about to say that it would allow us to see what a recovery would look like without any governmental attempt at a fix. But that's wrong, because an economy that ran on pure market principles could never get into a situation like this in the first place.

Byron