I was a bit taken aback with how brazen Paulson described his actions… I guess he can get away with that now that he’s not in office any more… Usually this kind of stuff comes out in leaked documents or third-party complaints, not with the party in question flat admitting it in front of Congress. There was some surprise not that it happened, but in how it was admitted.

Ben,

Yeah, that would have been nice. He could have embarrassed everyone involved possibly to the point of derailing the plan entirely.

You’ve been paying attention too, so you can’t honestly be “overcome with consternation, shock, or dismay“. Instead of acting surprised for dramatic effect, consider taking the opposite approach. Perhaps create an ongoing series of posts called “Government is Coercion”.

By the time you reached “Government is Coercion #529″, you would accurately convey the enormity of the situation without resorting to the kind of hyperbole that most people get adept at tuning out. You’d stand out by being one of the few calm, rational guys in the political blogosphere.

You’re not surprised or upset, because you’re paying attention. I suspect many of our other readers take this sort of news with the sort of grim realization that the government has now reached a point where they don’t have to hide their thuggery inside the velvet glove — they can show the iron fist outright.

But this blog is also about outreach. And if we can get enough people who never saw the fist before (only the glove) to recognize it now, maybe it will have an impact.

I can’t add any more words to this post, because what Paulson admitted is evidence enough.

I would instead spend my time building a laundry list of such examples to demonstrate that a market can’t simultaneously be “highly-regulated and “free”.