Necessity - an open letter to the President, public officials, and members of Congress

"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

-- An American major after the destruction of the Vietnamese Village Ben Tre

A lot of people are discussing what is "necessary" and what is not in these troubled economic times. President Bush justified the massive bailout package by saying that he signed it into law, not to destroy the free market system, but to save it.

This has some disturbing familiarity to me. Another version of the above quote:

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. Air Force Major by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Ben Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: "'it became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a U.S. major says." To this day, "Ben Tre logic" is a common saying for whenever a "logical" conclusion is to destroy something out of the perceived best interests of everyone involved. Papa Bravo Romeo - U. S. Navy Patrol Boats at War in Vietnam, by Wynn Goldsmith (pages 184 to 186) attributes the quote to USAF Major Chet Brown.

Well, to all you public officials, I don't agree that it was necessary to destroy the free market in order to save it. Part of a free market system, a very important part, is the ability for private efforts to fail. If somebody screws around and does a lousy job, they need to face the appropriate consequences. You can't just bail out every company that is about to go under. I'm willing to suffer the consequences of my own mistakes, even if my mistakes bankrupt me. But I'm not willing to reward the mistakes of others, especially if they made grossly incompetent policies. I'm also not happy about putting the government in charge of fixing the problems that it caused for Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac.

So in conclusion, it did not, nor should it ever, become necessary to destroy the world's economy in order to save it. Your actions and the actions of Congress and continuing support for Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac have begun an inevitable decline into socialism for the United States of America. I only hope that the world can survive.