What Really Keeps Me Up at Night

Slate's liberal blogger Mickey Kaus discusses the possibility of a left/right fusion around opposition to the Senate health bill. He's not buying it and uses the opportunity to bludgeon Big Labor, so if you are in to that sort of thing, go check out the whole post.

But in just setting up the scene Kaus has provided what to my ears is the absolute best summation of exactly what it is that is wrong with our current situation:

Today's left and right anti-Reid activists have a common enemy in corporatism, the easy alliance between Big Government and entrenched, favored too-big-to-fail businesses (Aetna, AIG .... ) that threatens to combine the inequality of capitalism with the dynamic innovation of socialism.

The recent economic crisis and the government response under both Bush and Obama may have gone so far as to institutionalize failure as one company after another lines up for public rescue from its own bad decisions.

This isn't simply cushioning the blow for the average worker during a painful period of readjustment. Recent bailouts provide government approval for failure in business whether from negligent leadership or out-dated business models. The result of which is that companies that should be gone remain on taxpayer funded life support; alive enough to be a drain on resources but not dead enough to disappear.

That Americans could be forced to support an economy that no longer provides the growth that improves lives is a very real and very scary possibility.