The Inimitable Tiff

The lead story in this morning’s Wall Street Journal was “U.S. Seals Bailout Deal.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers — no socialist, he — had a piece in this morning’s Washington Post (“A Bailout Is Just a Start”) that treated the legislation as a fait accompli. The lead editorial in the same paper was titled “The Deal is Done.” I’m pretty sure one of the Post’s headline writers is regretting his word choice.

It is rare that a consensus at one level — among policy analysts, journalists and professional economists — is so thoroughly bucked by the mechanisms of democracy. This is not to suggest that the professional consensus is entirely comfortable with the bailout, or that the bailout doesn’t impose real budgetary and moral hazards. But it is to suggest that the failure of the bailout is no great credit to democracy.