The message of Bush's press conference: bailout or starve. I have to say it's quite in line with some of his previous authoritarian best hits, such as "we spy, or you die." From a libertarian perspective, the legacy of the Bush Admin will be the final nail in the coffin of conflating Liberty with the American State. American Liberty was never going to die with the election of the likes of Che Guevara screaming marxist platitudes into a microphone; it was always going to die with the likes of George Bush whispering platitudes of liberty out one side of his mouth while propagating fear out the other.

Rojas over at the Crossed Pond hails the revised Bush Plan as a signal that liberty is alive and well in America. What exactly is this Bush concession to congress that portends future hope for liberty. Apparently, it's that the Federal Government will now have a equity stake in the credit markets. However, i would consider that to be the final capitulation, not a concession. Step back and think for the second about the ramifications of the State having an equity stake in the credit market's reaction to it's own monetary policy operations. This is a rigged game, and quite simply, it won't fly with the global credit markets. This is the desperate action of a banana republic, not the action of the world's global reserve currency. Bailing out and guaranteeing the counterparty risk associated with Wall Street's 75 trillion CDS bubble will lead to a far greater pain of the collapse of the dollar and the end of the dollar as the reserve currency. In the end, the bipartisan Bush plan will be good for nothing except for making banana splits.