I Think I'd Prefer to Be Taken Over by Giant Space Ants

If I wasn't already concerned about the government's takeover of AIG, Matt Yglesias starts listing things that progressives might do with the implicit ability to take over large financial institutions...

In November, there’s going to be an election. And in January, there’ll be a new President. And in the interim, progressive groups will probably come up with a lot of “ten ways to make everything awesome” proposals. And it’ll take 41 conservative senators to filibuster them all, and so they’ll all be filibustered. But if the government directly controls major financial institutions, that would give the new administration extraordinary leverage over the national economy. Suppose the new CEO of AIG decided he didn’t want to insure assets of companies whose executives make unseemly multiples of the national median income? There are all kinds of crazy things you could do. And of course not all of them woul dbe good ideas. But some of them would! And the smart folks on our side need to be figuring out which ones they are. It seems doubtful to me that a progressive administration would ever be able to get away with this much nationalizing of everything, but what’s done is done and I think it creates a real opportunity for “socially conscious insurance underwriting” or whatever you care to call it.

The model now seems to be that one should build a politically powerful private company that takes all sorts of wild risks, then rely on the taxpayers to bail them out because they're too big to fail. It may not work all of the time, but it will apparently work on occasion (see Bear Stearns and AIG). And liberals see this as a step toward nationalized corporations using their economic power to enact social policy (at least Yglesias seems to realize that some bad stuff might also occur). As Kent Brockman might say, it's time to welcome our new insect overlords.

If I wasn't voting McCain before, I will now. McCain may do some of the crazy crap listed here, but Obama's much more likely to do so, cheered on by people like Yglesias. It's sad that I'm stuck with these choices, but it would be even sadder to live in a world with "socially conscious insurance underwriting."