Barney Frank has dropped his demand that institutions receiving TARP money refrain from using corporate jets:

Financial institutions that get assistance through the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program had faced a provision that recipients of the money would be prohibited from owning or leasing private aircraft.
But Kansas is one of the nation’s centers of aircraft manufacturing, and state lawmakers complained that the provision could reduce aircraft orders, cost jobs and damage the industry’s image. So yesterday, Barney Frank (D-Mass.), head of the House Financial Services Committee and the author of the bill, lifted the jet ban. In a letter to Frank on Monday, Rep. Dennis Moore, a Kansas Democrat on the committee, wrote that the industry employs more than 44,000 in Kansas and that suppliers employ many more.

The corporate-jet ban was never more than a flea on the elephantoid TARP, yet in this tiny example there’s a big lesson about unintended consequences…