Political pigsty.(Letter to the editor)

Too big to rail? Sounds like an excerpt from George Orwell's Animal Farm. In the past six months, our government has borrowed billions of dollars to bail out companies we've repeatedly been told are "too big to rail." One of the basics of a thriving free-market economy is that businesses have the freedom to try, buy, sell, and, you guessed it, fail. What is the usual result of a failing business? People losing their jobs. But usually there's no hurt economy. Actually, it's just the opposite. The failure of one company is a great opportunity for another company to buy it out, most likely restoring many jobs, and thus turning an ill-run business into a well-run business that will improve the economy.

Freedom to fail allows individuals to learn how to succeed. This doesn't just apply to little businesses and lemonade stands, but to every business, no matter how big. A bailout by the government will not only continue to allow the bad-money practices that got the business into financial trouble in the first place, but by asking the Federal Reserve to print billions of dollars, government will rob the American people through the hidden tax of inflation. Now, once-privately owned businesses (which could have stayed that way if there had been no bailout) are, in effect, owned by the U.S. government. And so we sit back and watch out economy go down the drain.

In ...