Panic. Confidence. The Government. The real solution.

When the unemployment rate started going up a few years ago, a plan was put into place to extend unemployment benefits under an EMERGENCY plan. Since then a lot of people have gone onto unemployment and have stayed on it longer than any time in recent history.

An oil well explosion has caused millions of barrels of crude to spew all over the Gulf of Mexico. Its been over a month, and we don't have the hole stopped up. People are panicked.

Illegal aliens are running into the border states faster than ever. A state law that mirrors federal law, but allows for a STATE level conviction, and STATE funding to enforce has been called racist. It was only needed because the federal agents are under funded and not motivated to enforce the existing federal laws. With no effective way to stop the illegal aliens from coming in, delivering drugs, committing crimes and taking jobs, there are people who are panicked.

The country of Greece is going through a financial collapse, and is effectively bankrupt, not able to fund the interest payments on their nation's debt. This is killing the value of the Euro, making everyone in the European Union panic.

A few years ago, some people in Washington decided that every unemployed crackhead needed a mortgage, so they gave it to them, whether they had any chance of ever paying it back. Now that the values of those houses is dropping, and the Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are maturing, there are a lot of people panicked and abandoning those homes. This drives the real estate values down, and the interest up. The mutual funds based on those mortgages have lost investors, lost value, and are effectively worthless. A LOT of people had their retirements tied up in what seemed like a safe investment (real estate backed mutual funds) and are now panicking.

Panic is the opposite of confidence. Panic is generally bad. It means that people don't invest. They don't hire. They don't make purchases. They sit on what money they have and try not to spend it any faster than they have to. The auto manufacturing companies are feeling this. The real estate developers are feeling this. The politicians are feeling this. Panic is a big problem.

There is a growing segment of the population who think that confidence (and effectively every other solution) comes from the government. The opposite is closer to the truth. When the government tells you that you cannot find a job, and "here is a check as long as you don't succeed in finding a job" it kills your confidence. When the government says "here is $4500 to get rid of your paid-for car to get into a car loan" it kills your confidence, and people's confidence in the auto industry's abilities to sell cars. The government has been paying us to buy cars, houses, appliances, window screens, insulation, and all kinds of stuff that we may or may not need, but they are effectively telling us "you cannot do this on your own, so we will help you." This doesn't help build confidence.

When you were 16 to 20 years old and you saved up and bought your first car, you felt confident. You had something to be proud of. If your parents shelled out the money, and bought it for you, it wasn't nearly such an accomplishment. If the car you bought was a piece of junk compared to your "rich friend's" gift cars, you still had the satisfaction of knowing that you earned it yourself. If your first car was from your parents and your second car was paid for by your sweat, you had a different attitude about the second car. You know what I am referring to.

The oil spill was not from a lack of regulations and taxes. The government want to fix it by putting on more regulations and taxes. No one wanted the explosion to happen. Checks upon checks upon checks were in place to insure that it wouldn't happen. Sometimes equipment just fails. The people in charge of that are doing everything they can to fix it. We don't need the government to shake their finger at them and tell them to hurry up. The best engineers in the world are working on a solution. The leak will be stopped, and the cleanup will happen. More regulations won't hurry this process up, or prevent future failures.

The mortgage companies never wanted to make those loans to those undereducated and underfunded individuals. Without pressure from the Clinton (and Bush) administrations, those loans would have never been made. More regulations would not have prevented that mess. In fact, if the government would have stayed out of it, and let the free market decide who would get loans, and what they would pay for loans, then unqualified buyers would have stayed in their apartments until they could save for a down payment. They would have pride of ownership, and the confidence to pay the mortgage.

We have a lot of people out there working to end the free market system and regulate everything. They come up with bail out schemes, and use phrases like "too big to fail". I assure you that there is no such thing. If GM was losing as much money as it was for as long as it was, then its value would make the company a lot smaller than what we "the taxpayers" paid for it.
In the olden days, when the government didn't try to save every failing business, millionaires (or billionaires or investment groups) would step up and buy "troubled assets" for pennies on the dollar. They would take over management, cut the fat, and make the companies profitable again.
This process, even if it included bankruptcy, was part of the natural process of business. Kind of like a tree falling in the woods. In one way, its a failure, since its the dying of an organism, but as the wood decomposes, and becomes a habitat for many other things that live on dead trees, and the nutrients go back into the soil. If the government ran the forest management like they do these things, we would have every rotten tree propped up with some kind of framework keeping it from falling over. When companies fail, bargains happen. Assets go onto the auction block. Some companies are saved, and others go away.

If the government wants to instill confidence, they would stay out of it. Let the banks that cannot make it work sell out to the banks that can make it work. Let the unemployed $100k executives get off of the dole and start taking $40k sales jobs. Take the unemployed $50k guys and give them $30k border patrol jobs. It will be better than leaving them on the couch watching the news and making them more depressed.

Let the BP, Transocean, and Haliburton engineers do their jobs, and focus their efforts on the things that the government was chartered to do: Protect our borders, enforce our laws, and stop the expanding threats to our freedoms. When North Korea (a Communist Dictatorship and sworn enemy of Freedom) bombs a ship belonging to South Korea (our ally) then tells the world that they had better not retaliate, its kind of our responsibility to step up and do something.