I’m as much a limited government guy as the next fellow, but let’s not pretend that we live in some libertarian utopia in which the state has no role in the market. ~Stephen Bainbridge

Of course, that’s just the point.  Bainbridge isn’t as much of a limited government guy as the next fellow if the next follow is Mike Pence or, say, Daniel Larison, and his position on the bailout is the proof.  He thinks that socializing financiers’ risk on the dubious basis that it will avert catastrophe does not significantly compromise his claim to be “as much a limited government guy as the next fellow,” when it necessarily does.  What these people mean when they say this is that limited government is a nice thing to talk about and it is fine to defend when times are good, but when the going gets tough we basically accept that the welfarists and socialists have been right all along, at least up to a point. 

Bainbridge takes comfort in the distinction between principle and ideology, but what conservative principle has ever approved of the concentration of power in one man’s hands that is being vested in the Secretary of the Treasury?  What conservative principle ever celebrated the accumulation of vast amounts of public debt to prop up financial institutions?  This reminds me of the pathetic and servile response of more than a few conservatives to executive power-grabs and unconstitutional surveillance powers.  They would cry out, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact!”  Perhaps not, but I have never quite understood why that required us to euthanize constitutional government.  

Few on the right are more hostile to the perverse appeal to “creative destruction” than I am when it is used to justify de-industrialization, the displacement of people, the transformation of local communities or demographic upheaval through mass immigration, but what we are faced with this week is the victory of Hamiltonian collusion between finance and government to use the latter’s apparatus of power to shore up the former’s wealth.  Central government is robbing the people to prop up concentrated wealth, and claiming in the process that it is doing us a favor.  Never mind that the government’s alarmism may well be wrong. 

People have been cajoled into submission through fear and intimidation, and above all by the threat that life might become less comfortable.  In other words, advocates of the bailout are quite happy to say that liberty has a price and they are very happy to pay it so long as it avoids most of the unpleasantness.  “Give me liberty or give me a comfy retirement!” is not exactly a phrase that will live forever.  Thus an abject abandonment of liberty is here being implausibly dressed up as a defense of liberty.  Burke and Kirk would, I suspect, feel like retching if they had lived to see their understandings of constitutional government and social order used in this way.

It is easy to talk about principle when there is no crisis happening and no risk attached to standing on principle.  The real test comes when holding fast may actually cost something.  Holding to a principle, if it means anything, means that you value it more than mere self-interest, satisfaction or comfort.  A lot of Americans want to have it all–the pretense that they are free, with none of the responsibilities or dangers that go with it.  In reality, you can either have the latter and remain free, or you can cease being free and then be kept free (temporarily) from responsibility and danger. 

Update: Rep. Mary Kaptur (D-OH) is not going down without a fight.