I haven't seen any Romney quotes on the proposed bail-out. McCain has offered Romney's name and Michael Bloomberg's and Warren Buffet's as potential executives to oversee the plan.

That being said, Romney had a saying in the primary that I thought was spot on: "When Republicans act like Democrats, everybody loses." I can't help but think that the bail-out is exactly the kind of thing that Romney was talking about.

President Bush, for all the credit he gets for tax cuts, deserves some serious blame for previously expanding the budget more than LBJ and now proposing the largest socialization this country has seen since FDR. He has turned his back on the free market and the principles of prosperity that underly it. If that is not acting like a Democrat, I don't know what is. The ultimate consequence, as our man Mitt said so succinctly, is that everyone is going to lose.

Businesses will lose by not being punished for their bad behavior (i.e. lending with no prospect of being repaid) and not learning the lessons from their bad behavior. Taxpayers will lose because all we are taking on is debt, with no prospect of a profitable (or likely any) return. The government will lose because the additional debt could (and I think likely will) swamp the solvency of the government itself, destroying the value of the dollar and preventing the government from getting loans (even from such predators as China) to cover its own debts. All this will lead to the problem becoming not just a financial sector and housing problem, but to being a broader crisis of all Americans AND its government, too.

In short, everyone loses, all because Republicans and other defenders of market principles don't have the courage to say that the market can and will correct the problem, which it is doing right now by punishing those institutions and homeowners who were reckless. Republicans should know better than proposing such an anti-market plan. The bail-out will not just lead to socialism, it is socialism. It is government at its worst, fighting against the market to impose its own idea of economics. It's the type of thing we have come to expect from Democrats. Now that Republicans have taken on a similar tactic, we will all lose.