Yeah... Thats what we thought about the TARP too. Originally, it was almost poised to turn a profit. Then Paulson decided that buying troubled assets was not th

Yeah... Thats what we thought about the TARP too. Originally, it was almost poised to turn a profit. Then Paulson decided that buying troubled assets was not the way to go. The lesson is not (just) that government has trouble ever turning a profit but that its far too unpredictable. Human factors get vastly amplified the moment the government gets involved because power moves from the distributed hands of the market to the centralized hands of congress and a few top bureaucrats.