Bailout -- or else?

Economics columnist Anatole Kaletsky, in today's Times of London:

In one form or another, the package will surely be passed in the next few days, since the alternative would be the failure of every leading bank in America, the inability of the US Government to honour its guarantees to retail savers and the bankruptcy of many large US corporations, probably including General Motors and Ford. For the rest of the world, particularly for Britain, a definitive collapse of the US bailout would mean nationalisation of all leading banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions - and that unthinkable international impact is another reason why we can be fairly certain that a bailout of some kind will be passed quite soon.

Ross Douthat and Daniel Larison exemplify two plausible conservative reactions to the bailout plan. Larison's idea is that a bailout like this would traduce principles, and that we'd be better off to take the pain we have coming to us rather than give up the things we stand for to buy some temporary comfort. Douthat's idea -- and to be fair to Ross, it's not really an idea he's explicated, but a notion he's floated -- is that as awful as this bailout proposal is, the cost to society in terms of the instability a Great Depression redux would cause to the civic order would be worse.

This is by no means a trivial or even a theoretical point. Most Americans alive today simply have no way to imagine what life in a Depression would be like -- and that the rain, so to speak, would fall on the just and the unjust alike. Back in the Depression, the only way my dad and his family had food to eat some nights was because he and his brother shot squirrels and stewed them. I can remember as a child watching my dad some nights take leftover cornbread from dinner, but it in a tall glass, fill it with milk and eat the mush with a spoon. He told us that during the Depression, many was the night that that was their family's dinner: cornbread mush.

No meat. No vegetables. Just mush. For tens of millions of Americans, that was the 1930s.

I keep going back on forth on whether or not I support the proposed bailout. But I'm thinking a lot these days about my children, and how they would fare if they spent their childhoods in a Depression, as my father did (my mom was born in 1943, so she missed it). I think the lasting damage the Depression did to my dad was the absence of his father, who was away for years, working construction jobs where he could get them, sending money home to feed his family. My grandfather was robbed of much of his two boys' childhoods, because he had no choice but to travel for work. That could happen to me. That could happen to you. Conservatives should ask ourselves whether risking a collapse of the currrent economic and civil order is worth holding fast to principles. Phrased that way, the answer would likely be no, and I don't mean to beg the question. It could be that we've gotten so strung out that only crash therapy can return us to reality. I honestly don't know. I wish the way ahead were clear, and that we had leaders we could trust to get us there.