I was recently catching up on my Hoover Digest reading — you should, too, by the way — when I came across the transcript of a speech by noted legal scholar Richard Epstein in which he endorsed the original version of last fall’s financial bailout.

Disappointed, I read more carefully and saw that Epstein’s argument was primarily that moving bad loans and securities off the books of financial institutions and onto the federal balance sheet was a good idea because it was the only rapid means of getting the assets out from under the mark-to-market accounting regulations that were causing “a cascade” of problems in the financial system. “This is not a perfect solution,” he said, “but bailouts operate in the world of second-best. So we settle for an improvement and spurn the fruitless quest for perfection.”

A better argument for the bailout than I heard at the time (though not enough of one, in my book).