During the Tax Day Tea Parties I watched or participated in, speakers didn’t get the biggest response from the crowd when they criticized higher taxes, burgeoning government debt, the Democratic Congress, or President Obama personally — though each got a strong crowd response, of course (as did criticism of former President Bush’s spending policies, too).

No, the biggest applause lines happened when speakers attacked government bailouts of corporations. This shouldn’t be surprising. Free marketeers detest government intervention in the marketplace. Deficit hawks resent sudden, massive spending programs with few strings attached. Moderates would prefer to spend tax dollars on causes more noble-sounding than bailing out corporate executives and bondholders. Populists don’t like big business. And liberals don’t much like business of any size, as it turns out.

Fiscal conservatives should tap into public disaffection about Bailout Nation, drawing comparisons between bailing out irresponsible corporations and bailing out other irresponsible institutions and individuals, such as state and local governments, reckless borrowers, little-used transit systems, and failing public-school monopolies. Fiscal conservative should also seek to channel generalized anger about corporate bailouts into specific policy prescriptions for preserving economic freedom. Here are some useful arguments:

• The Cato Institute’s Vern McKinley and Gary Gegenheimer lay out the intellectual case against the improvisational bailout policies practiced by the Bush and Obama administrations. Whatever benefits one might imagine in theory from interventions and bailouts intended to limit systemic risk, they argue, are swamped by the costs of undermining investor confidence, creating uncertainty, and steering resources from those who make good choices to those who make bad ones. It’s hugely counterproductive:

Beyond the inconsistencies and implementation problems, financial-institution bailout policy has been unwieldy, inequitable, extremely costly, disruptive, and lacking in transparency and oversight. The policy response of bailouts and maintenance of the status quo has been precisely the wrong response, as it has led to retaining many of the mega-financial institutions that pose systemic risk, thus planting the seeds for future crises.

• In a Federalist Society debate with Richard Posner, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute demolishes the argument that deregulation and the principles of American capitalism were the cause of the international recession. The real culprit, he says, was government intervention into housing and credit markets. For example:

Because of their government backing, Fannie and Freddie were unstoppable; they could take whatever share they wanted of any market they chose to enter. In any event, the fight between Wall Street and Fannie and Freddie drove down the price of junk mortgages, drove up the housing bubble, and filled it with of unprecedentedly low quality mortgages. It also produced something like $2.5 trillion dollars in these low quality mortgages that Fannie and Freddie didn’t buy, but which were spread around the world in the form of mortgage-backed securities. It is these instruments that are the underlying cause of the financial crisis.

• The Heritage Foundation’s Andrew Grossman and David John explain why a new federal law empowering judges to “cram down” interest rates in troubled mortgages would be a mistake layered on top of many previous federal mistakes:

By causing additional write-downs of mortgage-backed assets, mortgage cramdowns would prolong and worsen the banking crisis, delaying economic recovery. In exchange, the policy would provide only temporary and extremely limited assistance to a fairly small number of homeowners while subjecting many more to the pain and expense of failed bankruptcies.

• Writing for Reason Online, Steve Chapman cites the auto bailout as a classic case of a government intervention in the market that will cause more problems than it “solves.” Indeed, he says, this bailout illustrates the policy confusion prevailing in Washington:

In recent months, we’ve been told that ambitious federal action is needed in the financial sector because unregulated commerce produced disastrously perverse results. But in the auto industry, competition has functioned reliably to reward sound companies and penalize bad ones. So clearly, there are only two occasions for massive government intervention: when the market fails, and when it works.