End it, don't mend it.

The dour Bob Barr once again shows his true colors by calling for a taxpayer funded bailout of both Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, the two government corporations involved in the mortgage field.

Government decided to make it easier for people in risky financial positions to buy homes, as opposed to renting. When other government policies sent the economy into a tailspin one result was that property values declined. This means that a lot of not-so-well-off individuals, who were induced by the government to buy property, now have mortgages on property that cost more than the property is worth.

The political classes wanted to encourage people who couldn’t afford property to buy it anyway. And now those people are hurting because of those stupid policies. The problem here is that any bail out will just encourage future malinvestment.

Bob Barr, the Libertarian (in name only) presidential candidate wants the taxpayers to be forced to bail out both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Barr starts out trying to sound libertarian. He always does that just before gutting principle and sounding like your typical unscrupulous, unprincipled politician. He acknowledges that any bail out would be taking “taxpayer money” since government has no money of its own. But since government intervention in the markets caused the problem he says government must bail out the industry.

He wants a new government program to bail out the old government program. “I think, though, that, if we -- we have some -- some temporary line of credit -- and I think it’s important to do this through the Congress, so Congress understands and has a stake in this as well.”

That statement indicates how corrupted Barr’s thinking is with the polictics-as-usual mentality. He wants a temporary credit line. As Milton Friedman noted, there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program. Secondly, what kind of moron actually thinks that Congressman “have a stake” in the programs they pass?

Congressmen don’t care if the programs work. They do care if they attract votes. And that is what Barr cares about. He is not standing up for free markets because promising a government bail out is good for the political bottom-line -- getting votes. The Libertarian Party, at the behest of the sell-outs in the national office, traded principles or appeal. They want votes not liberty.

Barr exemplifies the worst of the political mentality and he sounds just like the typical Republican. They always say that they support free markets but, of course, the current issue is an exception and government has to get involved. So they propose another temporary program in the hope of using it to secure more votes for themselves on election day.

This sort of compromising, Big Government mentality is precisely what we’d expect from Republicans. Apparently now the Libertarian Party is desperately trying to play the same game. But here is the reality. They are amateurs at political game playing. All they had to offer the public before were principles. Now they have no principles and instead want to manipulate the system to buy votes. But their amateur status tells me that they can’t really deliver the goodies.

The Libertarian Party has let the creepy Bob Barr push them into a corner where they can’t play the political game particularly well but neither can they offer the voters a principled stand on the issues. There simply is no reason for the LP to exist. At this point it exists only to sap the libertarian movement of energy and resources making it a liability not an asset. End it, don’t mend it. And in this case this applies to Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac and the Libertarian Party.