The pile grows

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has just shed new light on the bailout.
It is not, she says, a bailout. It is a buy-in.
That means it must be voluntary. Not even the U.S. government is so heavy-handed that it presumes to tell people what to buy. Buying is voluntary.
What is on the market here is extremely unappealing. It is failed home mortgages. The borrowers defaulted. Some businesses that dealt in those mortgages have collapsed and others are teetering.
No one in his right mind - make that no one playing with his own money - is going to voluntarily buy those mortgages for more than 1 cent on the dollar.
So, the governemnt is going to buy those mortgages with our money and then tell us that we wanted to do it.
I would like to call for a show of hands on the question of whether we wanted to do it.