Bailout

Looks like the bailout is going to go through this morning. To say I understand economics would be a real stretch, but I understand enough to note that a lot of the objections to the bailout I hear from citizenry left and right seem to have less to do with economics and more to do with pissed off populism. Frankly I don't know what to think. Megan McArdle has been invaluable to me helping to explain this mess, and her libertarian bona fides make her support of the bailout all the more convincing (here, here and here from last week). The problem for me is the utter uncertainty of how this will play out (which supporters of the bailout also acknowledge), not simply in the short term (economy continues to stumble but does not meltdown?) but in the long term with regard to the structure of our economy and even the principles and old verities on which I've grown up assuming it was prefaced. Under those principles markets should operate freely for the most part, but then widespread banking instability was assumed a thing of the past as well. I just don't understand enough to anticipate at all where this is going, and in that void is the inarticulate fear of a loss of something valuable and a shape of something new that we will regret.

Update: I've fixed the links