Anger and what to do with it

Barack Obama is "choked up with anger"! Wow! An angry man with nuclear weapons and so forth - what might happen here?

Unfortunately very little. Obama may be angry about AIG dishing out bonuses to the loser execs who ran the insurance giant into the ground (bailout at $180bn, bonuses at $165m) but the US does love enforcing contracts and all that crazy stuff that keeps liberalism going.

But should it? Will the West descend to Chinese levels of contempt for property rights if we break the odd contract that, effectively, amounts to pissing on the little people who pay taxes? Why be in government if one cannot alter the rules of the game to adapt to changed circumstance?

ETTL thinks this repeat game needs ending now. The bonus-soaked execs, at AIG and elsewhere, undertook their crazy strategies knowing that they were too big to fail, and that ultimately the risk for them personally was thus minimal. Would they have acted the same way had their bonuses, not shareholders' or taxpayers' money, been at risk? One doubts it.

So let's start halting bonuses that are patently undeserved, let's start violating the odd contract, so that future contracts will never have propped up by the people ever again. Market failure is bad enough; a response of government failure is even worse.