"Crisis of subsidization and intervention"

The Washington Post got the perspective of the Cato Institute on the $700B+ federal bailout:

"The biggest emotion we're feeling right now is frustration that the media narrative is that this is a crisis of the free market, a crisis of capitalism, a crisis of under-regulation," Boaz says. "In fact it's a crisis of subsidization and intervention."

Although the story touches on the financial mess, it is really more about how we think tanks respond to issues like the bailout.

It is easy to be pessimistic when it seems everything is going in the wrong direction in Washington (and Harrisburg), but John Samples, director of Cato's center for representative government, noted that

He says he tends toward pessimism on a morning like that, when the ideals seem to be slipping away. But on the bright side, he imagines how much worse things would be if he and his colleagues were not fighting the good fight.

He says: "You have to have a blind kind of faith that you represent what America is all about. It is sort of like a religion. People fail, they don't live up to ideals. But the ideals: You stick with them."

We couldn't agree more at the Commonwealth Foundation, whether we are fighting the Turnpike Commission or the labor unions on school choice, we can only imagine how bad things would be if we weren't here fighting the fight in Harrisburg.

Thanks for all your support!