Congress doesn’t have its own stash [of money]. Every dollar it injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It’s merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

As you probably learned in school, we founded this country as a free-market economy and viewed government intervention in the market with the greatest skepticism.

The above article is the clearest explanation I’ve seen for why bailouts and “stimulus plans” involving government spending never work.

The latest failed companies hoping for a bailout are General Motors and Ford. I hope Henry Ford — a great American like myself, who is currently whirling like a lathe in his Detroit grave — will pardon me for saying so, but these companies are nothing but engines of mass financial destruction.

According to the WSJ, GM and Ford invested a combined $465 billion between 1998 and 2007.

As of last Friday’s market close, they had market caps of $4 billion (Ford) and $1.7 billion (GM).

They’ve wiped out almost $460 billion of American capital in the last 10 years and now they want more money.

Look — my friend Paul Epps has a sister who spent every dollar she ever had on booze, drugs and abortions. For a while, friends and family members tried to help her by giving her money when she didn’t have any.

Do I have to tell you how that turned out?

I’m not suggesting that executives at Ford and GM spent the $460 billion on booze, drugs and abortions — not all of it anyway — but I am saying that sometimes people who don’t have any money can’t be helped by giving them more money.

Firstly, I’d like to thank Paul Epps for giving me this space on his web site to express my humble views. He is a real American.

What concerns me today is that a candidate for president, Barack Obama, has said that he wants to “spread the wealth around” in America.

It was a long time ago, but let me remind those of you who didn’t pay attention in history class that we founded this country as a rebellion against a too-powerful government. We believed in — and fought for — self-reliance and freedom, including the economic freedom to earn a dollar and spend it any way you want to.

When someone tells you that he is going to decide how much money you can earn before he starts taking it away from you and giving it to someone else, that man is a scoundrel.

And when Americans — the descendants of rebels and revolutionaries — can listen to this and fail to rise up in dissent, it makes me want to vomit for what this once-great nation has become.

Mr. Obama is proposing to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends by a staggering two-thirds, moving the rate up 10 percentage points to 25%, which could curtail investment and business on Wall Street, a backbone of the city’s and state’s economy.

OK, let me get this straight . . . the stock market’s dropping, banks are failing from lack of liquidity, no one wants to invest in American companies, and Obama’s solution is to raise the capital gains tax?!

In the event of an Obama presidency, I will taking a long position in blankets, canned goods and shotgun shells . . .