Libertarian / PaleoCon Blogs

David (on the Against Monopoly blog)--sure, it is understandable why you are "much more favorably inclined towards trademarks than other forms of intellectual property." As you say, "It seems to me a good thing that it is possible to tell who you are doing business with, and no downside monopoly". As I noted here, the primary justification for trademark rights is based on the notion of fraud--that the "infringer" is defrauding his customers by misrepresenting his identity and the source of the goods being sold (see pp. 43-44 of my Against Intellectual Property, pp. 59-63 of Reply to Van Dun: Non-Aggression and Title Transfer, p. 34 of A Theory of Contracts: Binding Promises, Title Transfer, and Inalienability).

But this analysis would give a cause of action to customers, however, not to the holder of the mark, who is not defrauded. Moreover, it would protect the customer only when there is fraud. For example, neither the customer (nor Rolex) should be able to sue Rolex knock-off companies, because people who buy fake Rolexes for $10 are not being defrauded. They know they are buying a cheap knock-off. But trademark law does give trademark holders--not customers--the right to sue infringers, regardless of whether there is really fraud to the consumer.

So while we can condemn fraudulent sales to customers, this is not what modern trademark law prevents. Modern state-run trademark law is almost as bad as cpoyright and patent, even if it has a less-objectionable core or origin. The fundamental problem with trademark law is that it is state law--it is created and administed by the state, which is a criminal organization. To expect justice from the state is like expecting a cat to bark.

You scratch our back, we'll scratch yours. As reported on Patently-O:

Outsourcing of Patent Preparation: PTO Says Beware

In a recent notice, the PTO has indicated that it may be illegal to outsource invention information to a foreign county for the purposes preparing a US patent application.
1. A foreign filing license from the USPTO does not authorize the exporting of subject matter abroad for the preparation of patent applications to be filed in the United States.
2. Applicants who are considering exporting subject matter abroad for the preparation of patent applications to be filed in the United States should contact the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) at the Department of Commerce for the appropriate clearances.

Can you just picture thousands of U.S. patent lawyers pumping their fists and collectively hissing Yes!--as the spectre of unscrupulous Indians writing $12,000 patent applications for $1000 recedes... No wonder so many patent lawyers are pro-patent system! The "patent bargain" conventionally refers to the government giving inventors a monopoly in return for their publicly disclosing how the invention works. But I think it has a second meaning.

In a July 21, 2008 column in the Jewish World Review with a shouting headline of STOP OIL SPECULATION NOW!, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann argued that the government should take action to restrict trading in futures markets. They are mistaken, however, in their assessment of oil speculation. Speculation is an important part of the supply and demand process.

Futures markets are markets in which people trade the right to specified quantities of a specified commodity to be delivered at some point in the future. For example, one might be able to buy or sell a contract whereby the seller agrees to deliver a barrel of crude petroleum on December 1, 2016 at a price of $150. Traders who believe the price will be below $150 per barrel should sell such a contract. Traders who believe the price will be above $150 per barrel should buy such a contract.

This has important implications for how resources are allocated across time and space. The price of oil today and the price of oil in the future will tend toward equality after we adjust for the time value of money (one dollar today is worth more than one dollar tomorrow, so anyone who wants a dollar tomorrow will have to pay interest). According to what economists call the law of one price, the discounted present value of oil today will equal the discounted present value of oil tomorrow, all other things remaining equal.

It is the fact that all other things do not remain equal that produces profitable opportunities for speculators. People with better information about market conditions can profit from their insight and perform the valuable public service of ensuring adequate oil supplies tomorrow.

Speculation does not interfere with supply and demand. Speculation is part the process by which supply and demand adjust. What Morris and McGann seek to restrict is exactly the kind of behavior that supply-and-demand analysis would predict.

What Morris and McGann deride as "unbridled gambling" is an essential part of the market process. This may be rhetorically effective but it is analytically erroneous. Morris and McGann seem to think of trading in futures markets as being equivalent to spinning a roulette wheel, and if you don't know what you're doing, speculating in futures markets can be just as dangerous. The fact of the matter, however, is that speculators are not gambling in the pure sense of the word. They are acting on the basis of their best understanding of current market conditions and their expectations about future market conditions. They may be incorrect, but they are not "gambling."

Morris and McGann write "(i)f there is any doubt that it is speculation, not the supply and demand for oil, that is driving up the price, look at this week's history of oil prices." He then cites President Bush's executive order to permit offshore drilling and OPEC's statement that oil demand was falling and argues that these were responsible for a $15 price drop even though "(n)o new oil gushed through the system."

This is exactly what supply and demand would predict. If offshore drilling is permitted, this will increase the future supply of oil and drive town the future price. People who were holding oil in anticipation of higher future prices will instead release some of that oil onto the market today, increasing the current supply of oil. Nothing untoward is going on: the supply of oil today is changing in response to traders' revised expectations about the supply of oil in the future. This is literally economics 101: what I have just described is what I teach in my econ 101 lectures on futures markets.

Morris and McGann conclude that "(o)il is just too important strategically and economically to allow that kind of speculation," but speculation is the market mechanism by which price volatility is reduced and future supplies are guaranteed. If oil really is that important, we should be loosening the restraints on futures market speculation rather than tightening them.

It seems that every once in a while, our political classes and their media partners place the mantle of "Keeper of the Secret" upon a political figure. After he was assassinated (but not before) John F. Kennedy was given that...

New Orleans City Business reports that Orleans Parish District Attorney Keva Landrum-Johnson has instituted a new policy of charging minor marijuana offenders with felonies if they have prior convictions. Under state law, possessing a small amount of marijuana is a misdemeanor that can result in a jail sentence of up to six months but is typically punished by a small fine. Subsequent offenses can be treated as felonies, punishable by up to five years in prison for a second offense and up to 20 years for a third offense. But Landrum-Johnson's predecessors routinely exercised their discretion to treat such offenses as misdemeanors. The new D.A. has reversed that policy so she can rack up felony prosecutions and demonstrate her tough-on-crime credentials:

Shortly after Keva Landrum-Johnson took over as district attorney...hundreds of new felony cases flooded the public defenders office, overwhelming the 29 defense attorneys.

After New Orleans regained its title as the nation's murder capital, the public demanded its city leaders crack down on violent crime. By filing hundreds of new felony cases each month, it appeared as if the new DA heeded their call.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the case, said Steve Singer, chief of trials for the Orleans Public Defenders Office.

The flood of new felony charges didn't target murderers, rapists or armed robbers— they targeted small-time marijuana users, sometimes caught with less than a gram of pot, and threatened them with lengthy prison sentences.

The resulting impact has clogged the courts with non-violent, petty offenses, drained the resources of the criminal justice system and damaged low-income African-American communities, Singer said.

Nearly all of the people facing felony charges for smoking pot are black and poor, because, as everyone knows, virtually no middle-class white people smoke pot. One defendant cited by the paper is a man who was "arrested once before as a teenager 20 years ago" and since then "has married, raised a family and kept out of trouble." Now he may have to spend the money he saved for his son's college tuition on legal expenses. Take that, crime!

In May I marveled at New York City's little-noticed crackdown on pot smokers, which has a similar racial skew, unjustly converts citable offenses to misdemeanors, but looks enlightened compared to Landrum-Johnson's crusade.

[via Paul Armentano at NORML]

Writes Danny Ajamian: "I have just checked into a hotel in Barcelona, and CNBC was carrying Barack Obama live in Berlin. I think Bush, McCain, Clinton, etc., could have delivered the same speech. "He showed his embracing of one world,...

(Thanks to Travis)...

Trawling YouTube's daily list of top "activism" videos, I found this wonderful, horrible clip of Noam Chomsky pontificating on the evils of pornography. Chomsky first defends himself against the charge that he himself is complicit in promoting pornography because, back in 2004, he was interviewed by Hustler magazine. But, he tells his interrogator, he "had never heard of The Hustler" until someone told him "what The Hustler was." Chomsky, a prolific emailer, apparently didn't know that The Google could have provided him with much information on The Hustler and its filthy contents.

Pornography, says the sage of MIT, is "disgraceful," "a humiliation and degradation of women." Does it matter, the interviewer wonders, that most porn performers "choose to do the job and get paid?" Chomsky offers this labored analogy in response: "The fact that women agreed to it and are paid is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favor of sweatshops in China where woman are locked into the factory and work fifteen hours a day and then the factory burns down and they all die. They were paid and they consented, but it doesn't make me in favor of it." And for all of you porn consumers out there, Chomsky wants you to know that if you get "pleasure out of the humiliation of women [you] have a problem." So how do we improve the lot of porn performers? By banning "the degradation of woman" and "eliminating the conditions in which woman cannot get decent jobs; not permit abusive and destructive behavior."

 

 

For those of you who speak a Scandinavian language, you can find out just what Noam Chomsky thinks of me here, and just what I think of him here.

In this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Thomas Schweich, a former State Department counternarcotics official, asks, "Is Afghanistan a Narco-State?" Schweich takes 5,500 words to tell his tale of how the good work of brave, committed drug warriors like himself was stymied by "an odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, politically motivated Democrats and the Taliban." But the short answer to the headine question is yes. A more interesting question, one that Schweich never asks: Why is Afghanistan a narco-state? Schweich warns that the opium trade finances the Taliban insurgency (as well as President Hamid Karzai's allies) and bemoans the corruption, violence, and lawlessness associated with it. Yet he never acknowledges that all these phenomena are consequences of drug prohibition, a policy the United States has insisted on exporting to other countries for nearly a century. It's not hard to see why he omits this point, since his solution to prohibition-related problems is more vigorous enforcement of prohibition.

Schweich repeatedly condemns U.S., British, and Afghan officials who are reluctant to support a more aggressive crackdown on opium, who oppose tactics such as aerial herbicide spraying and execution of traffickers. He never considers the possibility that their resistance might be due to something other than timorousness, myopia, corruption, blindness, political partisanship, or fanatical hatred of America. Yet some critics of Schweich's gung-ho approach, including American and British military officials, view the anti-drug fight as not just distracting but counterproductive, alienating Afghan farmers and strengthening the Taliban. Schweich reports he was astonished to discover that "British forces—centered in Helmand—actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort." Schweich brags that he put a stop to that. But is it really so crazy to reassure people whose support you're trying to win (or whose violent opposition you're trying to avoid) that your aim is not to deprive them of their livelihood or to wipe out half of their country's economy?

Schweich also never quite explains the ultimate goal of "the anti-poppy effort." He writes that "eradication was an essential component of successful anti-poppy efforts in Guatemala, Southeast Asia and Pakistan." And now Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's opium. If Schweich has his way and opium eradication there becomes a top U.S. priority, and if it is ultimately successful, surely that will be the end of it. No one will grow opium anywhere else, so heroin use will disappear.

Here's a fun fact Schweich mentions: The land devoted to opium poppies in Afghanistan, even at the current record level of production, totals just 637 square miles, less than a third the size of Rhode Island.

Previous reason coverage of Afghan poppies and the drug warriors who hate them here and here.

Watching Barack Obama's ich bin ein internationalist speech I found myself in constant, low-level irritation at what one might call the Audacity of Now. Which is to say, the man can't stop telling us that "this is the moment" when we "must" do this, that, and the other.

Not to be too curmudgeonly about it, but what's so special about this moment (as opposed to this moment), aside from the fact that a guy with a furrowed eyebrow and enviable teeth is running for president? Did Communism just collapse? Are we in some kind of hinge moment, a fork in the road between darkness and light? Yet count the ways in which Obama is sure that THIS IS THE MOMENT....

when our nations − and all nations − must summon that spirit [of the Berlin airlift] anew.

when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it.

when we must renew our resolve to rout the terrorists who threaten our security in Afghanistan, and the traffickers who sell drugs on your streets. 

when we must renew the goal of a world without nuclear weapons.

to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.

when every nation in Europe must have the chance to choose its own tomorrow free from the shadows of yesterday. 

when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. 

for trade that is free and fair for all.

we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.

when the world should support the millions of Iraqis who seek to rebuild their lives, even as we pass responsibility to the Iraqi government and finally bring this war to a close.

when we must come together to save this planet. 

to give our children back their future.

to stand as one.

when we must give hope to those left behind in a globalized world.

That's 14 freaking Moments, some of them as perennial and/or totally '80s as Vanity Fair Kennedy covers (save the planet? believe that children are our future? stand together as one?); some of them sorta nonsensical (uh, Europeans can freely choose their future these days); some of them code phrases meaning practically the opposite of their rhetorical content (free and fair trade for all!).

I'm an anti-must guy from way back, but what struck me watching was more the implication that all these things are boiling to a head right now because Barack Obama's running for president. I don't often agree with Charles Krauthammer but, well, I pretty much agree with Charles Krauthammer.

And this paragraph in particular gives me chills about Obama's apparently deeply felt belief about how to "give hope to those left behind in a globalized world":

This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably.  Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development.  But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many.  Together, we must forge trade that truly rewards the work that creates wealth, with meaningful protections for our people and our planet.  This is the moment for trade that is free and fair for all.

This, Mr. Hopey, is the moment where the two greatest anti-poverty policies known to mankind − immigration and free trade − are under constant attack in the rich West, precisely from the type of hope-floating politicians who would blame global warming on the Chinese, talk '70s-era bollocks about economic "sustainability," and use the kind of labor vs. capital rhetoric that fell out of fashion long before the kind of people cheering you back home today were jeering Ronnie Ray-gun for asking Gorby to "tear down this wall" two decades ago.

Hayek was not only a leading champion of liberty in the 20th century. As this massive book reveals, he was also a great economist whose elaboration on monetary theory and the business cycle made him the leading foe of Keynesian theory and policy in the English-speaking world. Here are collected his most important works on these topics: re-typeset, indexed for the first time, and beautifully bound in a 536- page hardbound book for the ages.

These works have been tragically out of print for many years. Together they constitute a complete presentation of Hayekian money and business cycle theory. Even more, they work together as an excellent elucidation of Austrian macroeconomic theory, which is why this book has already been adopted in some classrooms.

The timing could not be better. The entire world economy is now suffering from the effects of bad monetary policy, and with results that Hayek explains in great detail. With "counter-cyclical" policy again revealed as unworkable, and while the politicians plot to make matters worse, the contents of this book has direct bearing on present and future of monetary policy.

Hayek was barely out of his twenties in 1929 when he published the German versions of the first two works in this collection, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle and "The Paradox of Saving." The latter article was a long essay that was to become the core of his celebrated book and the third work in this volume, Prices and Production, the publication of which two years later made him a world-renowned economist by the age of thirty-two.

But the young Hayek did not pause to savor his success. He was already hard at work on "Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J.M. Keynes," a lengthy critical review of John Maynard Keynes's two-volume Treatise on Money, which had been published in 1930. Hayek's two-part review appeared in late 1931 and 1932.

There followed within a few years the other three works collected in this volume. "The Mythology of Capital" appeared in 1936 and was a response to Frank Knight's hostile criticisms of the Austrian theory of capital. A short article on "Investment That Raises the Demand for Capital" and the monograph Monetary Nationalism and International Stability were published in 1937.

These seven works taken together represent the first integration and systematic elaboration of the Austrian theories of money, capital, business cycles, and comparative monetary institutions, which constitute the essential core of Austrian macroeconomics.

These works have profoundly influenced postwar expositions of Austrian or capital-based macroeconomics down to the present day. The creation of such an oeuvre is a formidable intellectual feat over an entire lifetime; it is an absolute marvel when we consider that Hayek had completed it in the span of eight years (1929-1937) and still well shy of his fortieth birthday. Hayek's amazingly precocious intellect and creative genius are on full display in these works.

"The re-publication of these works in a single volume is a magnificent event that fills a yawning gap in the Austrian macroeconomic literature and provides modern Austrians with a model of how to advance economic theory through reasoned debate and criticism." Joseph T. Salerno, from the Introduction

"I congratulate the Ludwig von Mises Institute for bringing back into print Hayek's writings on business cycles. This collection will be a critical touchstone for future thinking in the area." Danny Quah, London School of Economics, from the Preface.

564 Pages, Hardcover, 2008, ISBN 978-1-933550-22-0

Siva Vaidhyanathan is writing a book called The Googlization of Everything and he's collecting data:

Do you remember the first time you used Google? When was it? How did you hear about Google? What was you first impression?...As Mudbone (Richard Pryor's character) used to say, "you only remember two times, your first and your last."

Put your experience in his comments section and/or share it here.

My first google was of my unusual last name "Mangu" in honor of the fact that my grandfather used to check every phone book he encountered on his travels, hoping to find out that there were more of us in America. At the time, the search wasn't fruitful. Now I know that there are Indian and Kenyan Mangus, plus a popular Dominican plantain dish.

Of course, 50 percent of Americans still haven't googled themselves.

Mike Meno at The Gazette (a Maryland weekly) called to say his paper ran additional local coverage about the Maryland State Police surveillance program's activities in Takoma Park, Md. His interview with Maryland Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-Dist. 20), who represents Takoma Park, brings up a good point:

[Raskin] also questioned how effective Maryland is in using grants from the U.S. Homeland Security Department, which provided much of the money that paid for the surveillance.

‘‘I believe this is a tremendous threat to civil liberty and a terrible waste of taxpayer dollars,” he said. ‘‘It reflects a perverse allocation of scarce public resources.”

Read the whole Gazette story here.

Some of the surveillance in Takoma Park took place at Takoma Park Presbyterian Church, which I find disturbing for two reasons: A) Presbyterians are harmless, and B) It sounds a lot like Huckabee advisor Jim Pinkerton's suggestion that we "put a cop in front of every mosque."

Jesse Walker blogged on the spies in Baltimore here.

Paying $4 for a gallon of gas is a drag, but what may be worse is listening to White House wannabes who promise to rescue us from our misery.

Take Senator McCain’s recent proposal to offer a $300 million cash prize to the inventor of a car battery that can out-green 100-mpg plug-in hybrids.  Is McCain’s money pile really necessary to spur our nation’s geniuses to get it together and invent an ultra-efficient car? reason.tv’s Ted Balaker thinks not.

Click here to watch the video.

Dub-Yuh says "Wall Street got drunk," referring to the Fed/Bush admiistration-generated recession we're in. Naturally, the obvious response by the administration is to throw a $250 billion subsidy at the "drunks" on Wall Street in the form of the Fannie/Freddie...

The progressive Democrats, like Dennis Kucinich, appear to have voted for more bankster-corporate-state welfare. The real defenders of the common man, like Ron Paul, oppose such fascism....

Most of the criticism of Barack Obama's Berlin speech came before the speech had even been delivered, and focused on trivia (he printed fliers in German!) and traditions that were invented last week or so (presidential candidates don't give speeches in other countries!). But the speech has been given now, and the text is more interesting than the atmospherics. Specifically:
Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words “never again” in Darfur?

That's not pablum. I count at least four extensions of American foreign policy here: increased foreign aid, increased funding for PEPFAR, sanctions, and maybe a little bit of ol' fashioned humanitarian intervention. (That's what he's occasionally suggested for Darfur, at least.) It's proof, if any more was needed, that Obama is not wary of foreign engagements. He's a progressive realist who thinks America hasn't done enough to police the world and to stave off future threats by doing whatever NGOs say we should be doing.

Most of our foreign policy debate has focused on Iraq, in part because that's where John McCain wants it to focus, in part because that's where our forces are at the moment. I definitely agree with Andrew Bacevich that an Obama victory discredits the Iraq project, while a McCain victory validates it. But McCain and Obama want the same thing, for Americans to be proud of their country again vis-a-vis its engagement in foreign conflicts. Put another way: I don't think an Obama victory discredits neoconservatism. He's offering neoconservatism with a human face.

Headline explained here.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty has a quiz: Obama speech lines versus "We Are the World" lyrics.

UPDATE II: Oh, I love hacks. From Obama's opening lines:

Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for President, but as a citizen – a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.

From Team John "Wow, it was a good idea to dare Obama to take this trip" McCain:

While Barack Obama took a premature victory lap today in the heart of Berlin, proclaiming himself a 'citizen of the world,' John McCain continued to make his case to the American citizens who will decide this election.

He declared himself a citizen of the U.S. and the world, smart guys. Is John McCain not a citizen of the world? When his map reaches the Atlantic Ocean, does it turn white and read "Here There Be Dragons"?

It strikes me as more fighting-the-last-war from McCain. John Kerry was vulnerable to attacks of America-hatin' globalism when he did things like say American policy decisions had to pass a "global test." Obama was putting American supremacy in the kind of gooey nougat shell that Europeans like.

Word on the street is that Gov. Mitt Romney is the favorite to fill out the GOP's presidential ticket. The American Spectator's Philip Klein says "shut the hell up, street." The key argument Klein makes is that the "Romney gives McCain economic cred" sales job (put forth by Karl Rove, among others) is baseless.
Romney was able to turn economic jitters to his advantage in the Michigan primary (after pledging $20 billion in subsidies for the auto industry), but he wasn't able to gain much traction on the issue elsewhere. In Florida, for instance, despite targeted messaging emphasizing his business credentials, Romney lost to McCain among voters who considered the economy the most important issue, 40 percent to 32 percent.

A deeper look at his performance in the primaries shows that Romney's appeal was stronger among higher-income voters than it was among the type of working class voters who will determine the election. Also, Romney consistently did substantially worse among those who thought the economy was "not good or poor" than he did among people who thought it was "excellent or good." In an electoral environment in which Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the state of the economy, this would be trouble.
Klein doesn't have a dog in this fight—his preferred candidate was some ex-New York City politician whose name escapes me. (He ran this year, right?) And he's right about the polls. But that's the worst reason to reject Romney as a VP candidate. Romney does have economic experience, and he does know more about economics than McCain. In some primary states, McCain was only beating Romney among those "economy" voters because they were voting for McCain anyway. That 8-point Florida lead on economics was matched by a 5-point McCain win. In California, which McCain won by about 8 points, Romney won "economy" voters by 13 points. The problem was that a bunch of people who thought Romney was better on the issue voted for McCain anyway.

Californians were right, by the way. McCain is a shambling mess on economics, whose answers on economic issues fall into four categories: 1)I was part of the Reagan revolution, 2)there's too much pork, 3)Phil Gramm and I are like *this* and 4)I served in Vietnam. I'm serious about that last one. Remember how he responded to this at the final GOP primary debate?
JANET HOOK: There's been a lot of discussion lately about the importance of leadership and management experience. What makes you more qualified than Mitt Romney, a successful CEO and businessman, to manage our economy?

MCCAIN: Because I know how to lead. I know how to lead. I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit. And I can hire lots of managers, but leadership is a quality that people look for. And I have the vision and the knowledge and the background to take on the transcendent issue of the 21st century, which is radical Islamic extremism.

I can't imagine a worse answer. OK, perhaps if McCain had thrust forward a copy of Das Kapital and said "this is what I'll do!" it would have been worse. But in about a minute he analogized economic management to the logistics of a peacetime Navy squadron and intimated that our problems would disappear if we ramped up the War on Terror just a bit. The cost of the war in Iraq? Decreased oil production? That had nothing to do with it.

So, polling-wise, it would be a mistake for McCain to pick Romney. But that doesn't mean it's fair. If only he'd been a Baptist, the sculpted flip-flopper would be the GOP nominee right now, and he would be making a credible economic argument.

John McCain has issued a curious response to the housing bailout bill. Here's how it begins:

Americans should be outraged at the latest sweetheart deal in Washington. Congress will put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for potentially hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

With combined obligations of roughly $5-trillion, the rapid failure of Fannie and Freddie would be a threat to mortgage markets and financial markets as a whole. Because of that threat, I support taking the unfortunate but necessary steps needed to keep the financial troubles at these two companies from further squeezing American families.

This strikes me as a classic example of intervention's inescapable logic: We broke it, so we bought it, and now it's too big to fail, even though it all sucks in the first place.

On that latter point, McCain has some interesting things to say:

[I]f a dime of taxpayer money ends up being directly invested [in Fannie/Freddie], the management and the board should immediately be replaced, multimillion dollar salaries should be cut, and bonuses and other compensation should be eliminated. They should cease all lobbying activities and drop all payments to outside lobbyists. And taxpayers should be first in line for any repayments.

Even with those terms, sticking Main Street Americans with Wall Street's bill is a shame on Washington. If elected, I'll continue my crusade for the right reform of the institutions: making them go away. I will get real regulation that limits their ability to borrow, shrinks their size until they are no longer a threat to our economy, and privatizes and eliminates their links to the government.

What about Obama?

I'm heartened that the President has decided to support this bipartisan bill that will help ensure that mortgages remain affordable for American families and to prevent hundreds of thousands home foreclosures. In the months since this housing package was announced, nearly a million additional families have faced foreclosure, and our economy has continued to deteriorate. We cannot wait for a million more foreclosures before taking additional action to help struggling families and strengthen our economy. That's why I've also proposed a second stimulus of at least $50 billion with energy rebates for families struggling with high gas prices, relief for states facing budget cuts, and additional measures to protect homeowners from foreclosure.

Bob Barr? A bit like McCain (interview is 10 days old):

I think right now, doing nothing would not be advisable. As much as a Libertarian, we don't like to see − and I don't like to see − the government get further involved with yet another sector of the economy.

I think, because the government has caused this problem, similar to the savings and loan problem that the government caused a generation ago, it has to do something. [...]

Yet, as long as it is done with the thought in mind that there has to be long-term congressional action here to restructure and reformulate the very way Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae operate, I think that would be an advisable solution, but not doing nothing. [...]

But the ultimate goal, I think, has to be a very firm commitment to restructure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.