I oppose the bailout of the financial industry.  I oppose it wholeheartedly.  This is why:

It’s not so much that the underlying reason for the whole mess was the quest for profit fueled by greed.  It’s not so much that these companies have been lying to us and are now getting their just deserts.

The real reason I oppose the bailout, is so that they’ll learn.

Remember when you were growing up, and you got in trouble financially and you called your dad and he’d bail your ass out, what did you learn?

You only learn when you have to make due on your own devices.

Those people on wall street had themselves a party, got drunk on profits, and now they have a hangover, they’re puking up all over the place and they want us to clean up their mess.

Why doesn’t the CEO of AIG, the president of Lehman Brothers, the auditors of these firms, the board of directors of these firms etc. actually the top brass of all these firms that are failing say “it’s my fault, here’s my salary and my assets to make up for it?”

Why don’t they own up to their muck up?  Why don’t they man up and take responsibility for their actions?  They either don’t have the testicular fortitude to do it or they do not have the moral fortitude to do it.  Either way, why bail them out?

These irresponsible people know that their Uncle Sam, is going to bail them out while they sit on their 100 foot yacht in the carribean sipping mojitos. They don’t care about us.

What the management of those firms have done, is nothing short of criminally negligent, and they need to be held accountable.  They do not need to be bailed out.  Take away their assets, throw them in the slammer and show the next generation of wall street management that this is what will happen to you if you screw up like these people did.

That’s the only banking and finance regulation that we need.