Lux Lucet

Is anyone too big to fail? Many think so. I heard a professor say that the debate over the 2008 Wall Street bailout was the most boring discussion he had ever heard. “Of course,” he told us, “the bailout was the right thing to do. Without it the financial system would have collapsed.”

As usual, the argument over the doctrine of too-big-to-fail (TBTF) hinges on the definition of the term. If by TBTF one means that the current corrupt system of welfare, warfare, phoney money, and bailouts would be threatened by the collapse of a particular financial organization, then yes, some institutions are too big to fail. Does anyone believe for a minute that crony capitalism could contiue without cronies?

On the other hand, if we define TBTF as meaning that the existence captialism, freedom and the nation itself is threatened unless the government aggressively acts to transfer billions or even trillions of dollars from American taxpayers to incompetent investment banks and dishonest insuance companies that made bad investments and as a result are teetering on edge of bankruptcy, then no, there’s no such thing as TBTF.

Capitalism is a system of private property; a system of profit and loss. Let the folks on Wall Street make as much money as they can. But if things go south, they have no claim on the property of others.