"Nationalization" is a word normally associated with socialist dictators and petty Third World tyrants. In this country, the government is not supposed to nationalize companies, much less entire industries. Instead, it bails them out or buys them up when they run into trouble.

The end result? The government runs them just as if they had been seized with military force. I'm not an economist, but I'm having trouble seeing this as anything other than de facto nationalization.

In a piece titled "Risk for thee but not for me," David Harsanyi looks at the disgraceful (IMO) bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not as a singular event, but as part of a trend:

The bailout allegedly will cost taxpayers approximately $200 billion. And, as you know, federal projections are always on target.

And where will it end? Airlines already have benefited from the largesse. Detroit's auto industry, it has been reported, hopes to secure $50 billion in additional federal loans to, you know, help out.

Well, since the Big Three built cars no one wanted, failed to embrace new technologies, offered sweetheart deals to executives and surrendered to predatory union demands . . . naturally, they deserve a cushy government loan. (I only hope newspapers are afforded such compassionate treatment. We're a national treasure, after all.)

Now, not only has a Republican administration boosted an incontrovertibly unfree market, but Democrats are selling Americans on the idea that similar centralization and regulation will benefit us in the areas of health care and energy.

We know that when any industry is insulated from risk, it makes reckless decisions. Economists call this "moral hazard."

Federal government is moral hazard central.

Like when grousing about his subsidizes that were being held up in Congress, one wind energy executive recently -- and probably unintentionally -- let slip: "We don't want to build a giant factory that the market doesn't need or want."

If there is no market, perhaps we have to be more realistic about the product's viability, whether we are talking about energy, health care and mortgages.

In the Third World countries that practice nationalization at gunpoint, they can always print more. And if that fails, they can engage in things like outright confiscation of wealth, or not allowing people to move their money.

Hope we don't go that route.

Not as funny as it sounds; in California there's a ballot initiative which would confiscate wealth, and impose a 55% "Exit Tax." Fortunately, California remains a state in which taxpayers still constitute a voting majority, so I doubt it will pass.

But what would happen if tax eaters ever became the majority? If de facto nationalization of the private sector continues as a growth "industry" the way it has, pretty soon most people will be transformed into de facto tax eaters, because they'll be working for the government.

And when we're all working for the government, who will pay the taxes?

I'm glad I'm not an economist.