The government’s proposal was originally aimed at aiding commercial and investment banks, ostensibly to relieve the so-called credit crunch. Other plutocrats resented being left out, however, and they have quickly marshalled their political forces to gain a piece of the action. As the New York Times reports today, “nobody wants to be left out of Treasury’s proposal to buy up bad assets of financial institutions.”

So, the Times reports, the Financial Services Roundtable is urging that “a wide variety of institutions should be able to take advantage of the bailout, and that these companies should be able to sell off any investments linked to mortgages.” And why, pray tell, “should” they have such a privilege? Why, simply because the booty is there for the taking, and no one should get it while others go without!

Already the scope of the government’s proposal has been widened to allow the Treasury to buy not only mortgage-related paper, but “any other financial instrument.” After all, why be stingy, especially considering that it’s not the Treasury officials’ own money they’ll be spending, but yours and mine, dear taxpayer?

Small banks want the government to buy “loans they made to home builders and commercial developers.” Big banks want certain accounting rules suspended “to avoid taking big losses on the assets they sell to Treasury.” I want a maid, a gardener, a valet, and a cook, along with a few billion dollars to tide me over until my next mistake.

Other bankers are pushing to include municipal securities in the plundering free-for-all, “as part of a broader effort to restore investor confidence in money market funds”–and, by the way, to save their own rear ends.

Big financial firms are angling, too, to become the government’s agents in handling all the “securities” it is about the acquire with the $700 billion (or–don’t be surprised–more) it will spend to carry out this travesty of saving civilization.

Not to be outdone, the Democrats, ever the friends of the Little Man, are bleating for a broadening of the bailout to reach distressed homeowners directly. So, the Treasury should not simply absorb the mortgages and other rotten paper in the lenders’ possession, but also should suspend the contractual obligations of John Q. Deadbeat, who took on a mortgage he could not afford to pay off under the assumption that house prices would rise forever and, if they didn’t, he would simply walk away from his promise to pay, having no equity in his house anyway.

I hold in my sweaty hands a news release from “leading consumer, labor and civil rights groups” that advocates: “bailout must include relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, not just Wall Street.” This manifesto, which is addressed to “Dear Member of Congress,” states:

The undersigned organizations strongly urge you to include court-supervised mortgage restructuring for American homeowners to allow them to save their homes in any legislation that would use our tax dollars to bail out the financial services industry from its self-imposed crisis. Purchasing subprime and Alt A private securities will not provide the government with any legal ability to modify loans and keep families in their homes, which is necessary to stop the crisis. We cannot support legislation that fails to help the millions of families in danger of losing their homes, while spending hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out those who caused the problem.

In other words, the government’s humongous bailout for fat cats is a looming disaster; the only way to make it acceptable is to multiply its disastrousness by a factor of two or three. As for the taxpayers, let them eat cake.

This letter/press release is signed by the usual suspects on the left, including the AFL-CIO, Consumer Federation of America, NAACP, National Council of La Raza, Rainbow Push Coalition, U.S PIRG, and the National Fair Housing Alliance. It’s an almost complete list of the groups that faithfully support the Democrat in every election, no matter who or what he or she may be in addition to being the Democrat–a set of groups, in other words, for whom the currently sitting president has never shed a single tear.

No matter. At times such as the present, when politicians and well-connected interest groups are attempting to stampede the public into acquiescing quietly as it is being plundered mercilessly, everybody with any political clout is a potential looter. Come one, come all.

Over a period of about five years, Sherry Jones researched and wrote a historical novel about A'isha, the third wife of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. This project included, among other things, studying Arabic. Random House signed a contract to publish the book and organized an eight-city book tour.

Meanwhile, they sent the galleys of the book to Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin and a specialist in the period in which the novel is set. They asked if she would be willing to write a positive blurb for the book's jacket. Publishers routinely do this as part of their efforts to win favor and sell copies of the book. In this case, it had, to put it mildly, the opposite sort of effect. Spellberg, who later described the novel as "very ugly, stupid piece of work" immediately "warned" (her word, apparently) Random that publishing the book would expose their building and staff to very serious danger, calling it "'a declaration of war … explosive stuff … a national-security issue." At about the same time, she alerted the editor of a Muslim web site about the book and her view that it ""made fun of Muslims and their history." This led eventually to message to an email list and eventually to a wave of angry blogging about this "new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam."

Random canceled plans to publish the book, apparently breaching their $100,000 contract with Jones.

I see a fascinating ambiguity in the reported facts about Prof. Spellberg's behavior in this case. They seem to be more or less consistent with at least three radically different scenarios:

1. She was genuinely concerned about the danger to Random and was offering them her (unsolicited) professional opinion on this matter in order to be helpful. This would be perfectly unobjectionable, of course. She was not trying to violate another person's freedom of expression, she was only exercising her own. One thing that stands in the way of this interpretation, at least for the moment, is the fact that none of the quotations from the book that have come to light so far seem at all insulting or, to a rational person, morally offensive. From all accounts (except Prof. Spellberg's) it sounds like this book was not meant to be insulting or even critical of Islam or its prophet. We are not talking about The Satanic Verses here. More important, this scenario is not easy to square with the fact that, at the same time that she was helpfully warning Random, she was apparently trying to get that web site editor upset and alarmed about the book. Couldn't she foresee that this could indirectly trigger the very sorts of events that she was supposedly trying to help Random to avoid?

2. Stephen Law suggests that, perhaps, she was fearful of her own safety and made that hard-to-square phone call in order to dissociate herself from the book. Here once again the odd thing is that she seemed to be actively trying to get others upset about the book. That would seem to mean, on this interpretation of the facts, that she was in effect trying to sic the dogs on someone else for the sole purpose of keeping them from biting herself.

3. Yet another possibility is that she detested the book herself and was using the hypothetical violent behavior of others in order to get its publication suppressed. This raises a very interesting ethical issue. We all know what to think of hooligans who break into a newspaper office and destroy its presses because they print things that the hooligans don't like. What, on the other hand, should we think of someone who uses their behavior, and for the very same ends -- to suppress words that they don't like? Suppose that these other people would never do anything violent themselves, and have always deplored such thuggery.

Usually, thugs of this sort don't chop up printing presses with axes simply because they enjoy doing so. Such behavior is a means to an end: they want to silence someone else. If the mere threat of doing this is sufficient to silence these others, so much the better. Thus someone who uses their behavior in order to achieve their ends -- by deliberately communicating and facilitating the threat -- is functioning as an essential working part of the same system of oppression. The fact that they would never dirty their own hands with violence might make their guilt the less, but their shame is more.

In the public controversy about this case, Salman Rushdie deplored the incident as "censorship by fear." On the other hand, Stanley Fish, in his blog, denied that this is censorship at all. Fish holds the theory that the word "censorship" properly speaking can only be applied to governmental suppression. I have never been entirely sure what to think about this sort of issue. But I do know what the present status of Jones' book is: its publication has been picked up by a British publisher, more obscure and with fewer assets than Random, but with much more courage.

Thus the book has been shunted into a more marginal area of the publishing world, where it is apt to get less attention and be less upsetting of the rest of us. This is what usually happens in cases of semi-quasi-censorship. No blood is shed, no property is destroyed, but it is easier to ignore what we don't want to hear.

We all share a common humanity when it comes to death, especially of those close to us. We turn to the people we've built and shared a life with for comfort and consolation in those times. We share that same humanity in times of great joy - at the weddings or births or anniversaries of our friends and family. And we want to share those moments with the person with whom we've shared the journey of our lives.

Sitting there watching those three couples and thinking about how they can never fully share those times of sorrow and joy without thinking twice about where they are and who might be watching, and without the full protection of the law if it was their own partner who was being mourned, not to mention whether some of their own families and friends might have rejected the very relationships that sustain them in such times, welled up my political anger and sense of injustice, of both the thin and thick libertarian variety.

Libertarians can disagree in good faith about what the relationship should be between marriage and the state. In the first-best world, many of us agree that marriage should be freed from the state. I certainly do. And in the second-best world we can and do disagree about whether the state should treat same-sex couples equally when it comes to marriage. As a matter of justice and equality under the law (a classical liberal idea that unfortunately gets short shrift in the modern libertarian emphasis on reducing the size and scope of the state), my own view is that libertarians should support measures to legalize same-sex marriage, including judicial ones. That said, there are certainly cogent libertarian arguments in the other direction, weaker though they may be.

As my wife and I celebrate our 20th anniversary this coming Thursday, I simply cannot imagine having to engage in the fancy footwork about our relationship that gays and lesbians do about theirs, nor wondering and worrying about how the law would treat either of us if something happened to the other. These concerns about our common humanity and treating equally the relationships so many of us rely on in times of sorrow and joy should, in my view, be part of a thicker libertarianism that is more than just politically tolerant or neutral about such relationships, but instead is positively supportive of them as part of a larger vision of a world in which individuals are free to create meaning out of the voluntary relationships they construct in their lives.

To be clear: I'm not suggesting any role for the state in this (beyond treating such relationships as equal to heterosexual ones as a second-best solution), nor am I suggesting that it is "unlibertarian" to simply dislike such relationships. What I am saying is that I wish more libertarians would get past thin approaches that treat the marriage issue no differently than the issue of, say, whether municipal power companies are inefficient.

The marriage question is more than an abstract exercise in political philosophy; it goes to the very core of who we are as human beings and what it means to live a life of dignity. How someone committed to individual liberty can be anything less than supportive of the desire of gays and lesbians to be treated equally, both under the law and in the eyes of others, when it comes to how we face the common sorrows and joys of human existence remains a very frustrating puzzle to me.

"Government to the rescue" -- what an absurd idea. But just about everyone's buying it.

Not folksy local columnist Dan Barkin of the Raleigh News and Observer, however. He recalls how the federal government promoted home-buying in the mid-1990s:

"The federal government leaned heavily on banks to loosen up lending and eliminate 'red-lining,' the withholding of mortgages from entire neighborhoods. Down payments were reduced. Mortgages were available with low initial interest rates. The government and the big mortgage purchasers -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- pushed hard to streamline the underwriting process."

He recalls the movie"It's a Wonderful Life," which condemns Henry F. Potter, the mean-spirited banker who hated to lend money. Barkin even suggests that when the movie is shown again at Christmas"maybe we'll realize that Henry Potter got a bad rap." Potter actually worried about"whether people could make the payments."

In this short clip from the notorious, pro-Stalin film from 1943, "Mission to Moscow," Walter Huston, playing the American ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, smears pre-war non-interventionists, defends the Soviet invasion of Finland, and depicts the Soviets as peace-loving.

Apparently, Davies was not a typical fellow traveler. According to Soviet archives, he purchased art at discount prices that had been confiscated from purge victims.

I thought immediately of this idea today as I read the Washington Post’s report of the Fed’s loan/takeover of the insurance giant AIG. Having heard preliminary discussions of the possibility of such a takeover, I had wondered about the government’s authority for such an action. The Post’s report answered my question as follows: “The Fed is using the emergency authority it was granted during the Great Depression. By law, the Fed can lend money to any individual, partnership or corporation in unusual and exigent circumstances, when the borrower cannot access funds in other ways. The power had not been exercised until March, when the Fed used it to rescue Bear Stearns.” I confess that I had not known about this particular Fed authority until today.

So, here we are in the year 2008, witnessing the use of a power that had lain dormant in the government’s arsenal for more than 70 years, a power whose existence, I am confident, few people were aware of. Beware, all ye who would endow the state with amplified powers. It may refrain from using those powers for a very long time. Yet, there they lie, sleeping peacefully, but capable of being awakened and used with highly consequential (and, as in this case, extremely unfortunate) effect.