As noted in Bailout Bloviation, our economy faces a difficult question, and people are looking anywhere but at the issues.

Most of the responses to a bailout have been of the following nature:

(a) We got screwed, let's screw them back.
(b) As a policy, this bailout is a terrible idea for the following ideological reasons...
(c) Comments for a libertarian-style economy
(d) Comments for a liberalized, socialized economy.
(e) We should give that money to The People instead.

What's hilarious about all of these is that they do not address the issue, which is:

I. The mistake is already made. The trigger was pulled long ago. The question is not what we do tomorrow, or what we should have done yesterday, but what we do today.
II. This country is ideologically divided, so we don't have a clear direction to our economy or social policy, so wanting the dogmatically-correct for any dogma is misguided.
III. Infrastructure, like banking systems, gives to all of us by being there; if it gets sick, we need to fix it.

I know my viewpoint on this is unpopular but here's another list:

I. Most of the people are wrong all of the time. History shows us this. In fact, the first list above shows us this. If you look at these responses, none address the problem as it actually is; they address opinions about the problem, and thoughts about dogma, but are not pragmatic responses. "It shouldn't be this way" is the most useless statement in the world.

II. My viewpoint is almost always unpopular because it addresses the future not the past. Most people look toward the past, comment on it, and feel better. I look toward the future because I read history, and my hobby is connecting paths and patterns in that history. I see looking toward the past as self-defeating. By the nature of the relative motion of time, looking toward the present or the past is looking toward the appearance of the effect of causes long out of reach. Instead, look toward the cause of the future, and fix the vectors of that.

III. There are many unpopular viewpoints; truthful ones are unpopular for a few years, then suddenly become common wisdom. Maybe a "few years" sometimes is a few centuries. I have a feeling that the ideas CORRUPT espouses have been unpopular for 2,000 years, but at some point within a handful of centuries, will be seen as the common sense view of the past.

IV. Popularity itself is a survey of wish fulfillment -- what people wish reality was, not what it is, nor how to fix it. People think of themselves first unless given a unitive reason not to, like God or building a future civilization. As a result, they're thinking of only part of the situation, which is how it affects them directly. The answer is in 99% of all cases that they play no role in the actual infrastructure or direction of the country, so how things affect them is a question of whether they like it or not, since they see only the effect on themselves, and aren't thinking about how the nation as an organic whole is affected.

The real cause of this bailout: federal laws demanding easier loans in order to satisfy the Crowd, specifically the white liberal crowd, who basically masturbated over how cool they were for helping out them poor minorities.

The secondary cause of this bailout: in a society where borrowing is power, people live on credit, and take out secondary loans on that house or live with a high credit-card balance. While the ARM crisis triggered its own mess, it was helped by secondary effects. People living with high loans also had high credit card balances and were living past their means. The market is now adjusting value, something it has steadily been doing since the Democrats in the 1990s inflated the dollar as a consequence of their economic policy of making loans very accessible through low interest rates.

Will low interest rates come back to haunt us? Right now it is whoopee land for debtors, who can refinance their home mortgages at the lowest interest rates in many years. But for savers and investors, both big and small, whose living standards are dependent on their investment incomes, low interest rates are causing them to take greater risks with their wealth.
...
Low interest rates are a principal factor driving the stock market up. It is straightforward supply and demand. As bigger returns are sought and more money is shifted from low-paying certificates of deposit and money market funds into stocks, the stock market rises ever higher.

The problem for the investor is that it may be the inflow of money into stocks, rather than the underlying profitability of the companies or the outlook for the economy, that is keeping the market up. If the stock market gets too far ahead of the underlying fundamentals, the market drops, wiping out invested wealth.

Add to this the dot-com boom, which our good liberal government in the 1990s saw fit to do nothing about, and in fact encourage, even though it was creating overvalued companies that sold nothing tangible, and even worse, sold it to other dot-com boomheads, creating a mini ponzi scheme within our economy. People are still arguing over whether the dot-coms were worth what they were paid for; a common sense approach is to ask whether they had a marketable product, or whether a big trade was made in reselling each other that mythical measurement of future profit, "page-views" and "users," without knowing for example that those users were not of a useful sort for making profit:

The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks. While many online media companies use click-through rate as an ad negotiation currency, the study shows that heavy clickers are not representative of the general public. In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage.

Right there is the problem in common between the mortgage crisis and the dot-com boom: people exercising their freedom, but doing so in a way destructive to all of us because they are clueless. OMG, that wasn't very PC -- although clearly we're talking about a group with representatives from every gender, race, religion, ethnicity, penis size, acne level, methane production level, sexual position preference, and seropositivity index -- but look at these two groups as what they are.

ARM loans were marketed to people unable to afford homes, and clueless enough to think that "rates stay low as long as the economy keeps rising" was a good 25-year-plan. Dot-com booms were based on the value of clicks by people who turn out to be internet addicts because they have no cheaper form of entertainment, and lack money to do most anything else. (Most people assess an income of $50,000 a year as a minimum for entrance into the middle class in this country; pretty much any product you want to buy for reasons of it being of quality, durability or utility is marketed toward the middle class.)

Time and time again, we see this pathology, what Garret Hardin calls The Tragedy of the Commons: ordinary people doing what they think is right results in a crisis for all.

Measure the environmental crisis this way. The average person can afford an SUV, or an apartment in NYC that requires ten thousand acres of farmland to support it and offset the pollution generated in keeping it running. So they buy it. People can afford to buy plane tickets jetting them around the world -- so they do. When they go shopping, the lowest prices are at Wal-Mart, for cheap plastic goods that will break in a year, but are much cheaper than doing it the right way -- so they buy it, and landfill proliferates. They can buy TV dinners and fast food, so they do -- waste piles up. They can breed recklessly in the third world, creating more people practicing slash and burn agriculture and selling their nations to foreign investors -- so they do. The weak link in the human chain is the individual, and the generality that very few individuals have critical thinking or judgment skills to write home about.

Yet our liberal brothers defend them and their holy right to this selfish, destructive oblivion:

The dirty little secret of the West's collapse is that it has come from within. The extent of our modern disease is revealed by the fact that when we think this, we immediately try to blame either everyone, or no one. We are afraid to blame a process and implicate certain people as its methods. And why not? We're not passing moral judgment, claiming them to be the spawn of Satan, as our leaders do to enemies during wartime. All we are saying is that they, by what they do, have caused a massive problem. The real social taboo broken here is the unstated obvious: in order to fix the problem, we have to limit their sainted "freedom." Nevermind that few people actually need freedom. What they want are normal, comfortable lives, without other people intruding in upon them and telling them what to think. That's not freedom; it's common sense and common decency. People like to conceive of "freedom," however, as a limitless absolute. "I can do anything I want," they say, forgetting that most of what they actually want falls within the narrow sphere of what benefits them in a practical sense. You could make sculptures out of your own mucus... but do you need that "freedom"?

Yet any person who advocates breeching that "freedom" is portrayed to be a bad guy, which is interesting, since in times without freedom, there was not such widespread deception where a few people could control "truth" for an entire planet, even if through the quasi-voluntarily methods of television and entertainment media. To a thinking person, the fear of losing "freedom" is another type of deflection: finding something irrelevant to the cause to blame. It's psychologically very easy, actually: to blame something external divides the world into two segments, the desired and the undesired. In actuality, it makes no sense to divide things that already exist into desired/undesired, because the only thing that can be desired is an outcome and by definition anything but that outcome is undesired - yet outcomes usually occur in partial degrees, or with modifications, so that kneejerk response makes little sense. When manipulating the masses, however, it makes sense to tell them that the world is divided into "freedom" and those who hate freedom, as they react more quickly to the positive feelings associated with "freedom" and only more slowly to the logic trap into which they fall. Heart first, then brain - even with very smart people.
...
When we remove all the irrelevant theory, what becomes clear is that this is a belief system designed to protect a type of person; that is why its negative, preemptive assessment. It does not have a goal. It does not have an ideology. It is wholly negative in nature, in that it identifies certain things that are destabilizing to those who find it important, and it attempts to censure and criminalize those. It in fact replaces the idea of having a goal with the idea of not doing wrong, and thus restricts what can be done to those whose actions might be so selfish that any sort of goal would conflict with them. These sort of people might be described as passive criminals, then, since what they do is not outright criminal, but by being what is done instead of pursuing a healthy goal, and by requiring a morality that prevents others from interrupting it, it supplants the seeking of a healthy goal. It is thus a crime of omission if nothing else.

What's the mortgage mess, then? People taking care of idiots, at the behest of idiots in government. What happens when insane laws are made? Those who aren't delusional take advantage of the situation, because they know that once insane laws are made, nothing will stop the inevitability of a dot-com crash or mortgage market bomb. It's like if your neighbor decides he's going to start a fire in his living room -- you might as well steal the stereo system from the bedroom above, because everything's gonna burn.

This is why Wall Street bankers raided like mad fiends, speculated like gamblers, and obsessively pumped the market like drug addicts -- they saw, before the economically less-advised, that the market was already a corpse because our leaders had demanded unrealistic expectations from it. This is why during the dot-com boom, all of the really good investors were manic and somewhat reckless. They knew they were salvaging the best organs from a dead man walking, and wanted to get their money out and transfer it into something that would retain value before the rest of the world caught on to what was going on, and adjusted the value of the market accordingly. Billions were made. But not by the people demand regulation.

When social order declines through bad leadership, common sense is not to best on the past -- the social order that just failed -- but to bet on the future, which is getting your pile of cash away from the idiots before they screw it up again. I think that's why people who are older and wiser and accustomed to this system have not really blinked at this bailout. Waste all your money keeping the system going? Of course they did -- they do it with every single thing they do, every day. When society is ruled by popularity, it tends to deny social order, because individuals don't want to be obligated. They want to be free. As a result, it creates decaying situations in which anyone with a brain would do as those Wall Street traders did -- raid while the raiding's good, because soon the idiots will destroy the rest of it with another well-intentioned, unrealistic plan. Civilization is its own enemy.

What's a way to compound the mortgage mess, then? Act like an idiot and demand either (a) an emotional response or (b) an ideologically-pure, dogma-bound response that doesn't address the situation as it is now and for the future. You're looking toward the past and at times when such interventions would have been positive; instead, they lost -- your side lost -- and now you either deal with the consequences, or become one more talking head bloviating its way into fantasy and wish fulfillment, ignoring the reality.