"Government Bailout Plan"

By now we are all familiar with the government's bailout plan for Wall Street. It's been headlined in newspapers, news broadcasts, and on the Internet for the last week.

Now the question has come up about whether this bailout plan is capitalistic or socialistic. We must remember in this debate that we don't have a purely capitalist economy. It is not laissez-faire. It simply can't be due to the size of the corporations we have - sizes that couldn't have possibly been foreseen by Adam Smith. But I think that this debate is pointless. There are reasonable arguments on both sides but, we need to worry about whether or not the bailout will work and not what theory it is based on. If the bailout plan were to work and we chose not to use it simply because it might perhaps be on the socialist side, then we would deserve whatever ramifications would follow. With the basics that I have learned about both capitalism and socialism, it seems that at times one must be used to correct the other's flaws. We have to get over ourselves and be able to compromise. We can label a bailout socialist, communist, or whatever else comes to mind, but a one time deal does not make us neo-Bolsheviks.

Whatever happens we must learn from the mistakes that were made this time and never allow this to happen again.