Holman Jenkins’s Wednesday Wall Street Journal column on proposed mortgage bail-outs last week was, as usual, excellent. His central point was that:

The truth today is that politicians are rushing to prop up house prices not to rescue the poor from the ignominy of renting, but to get past the next election without affluent voters having to confront a realistic decline in the market value of their main assets.

This program is animated by the same philosophy that has brought us the current stimulus legislation designed to head off a recession that might already be here and that might never happen anyway by taxing some people today and some people in the future via deficits in order to give this money to some third group of people. Amazingly, this results in politicians mailing checks to a very large number of voters months before an election.

Short-term band-aids like these are sometimes the least-bad of several bad options, but there is an inherent tendency for any government without a firm market orientation to over-use them. We are right now risking a return to 1970s-style stagflation, and the economic debates among current leading politicians, as well as among the leading presidential contenders, make it seem as if they are all channeling the Nixon-Ford-Carter economic dream team.