When the Church was still writing exclusively at Jesus Drives an SUV, it complained several times about the central instruments of our “free market” society – the central reserves and the large private banks – having almost nothing to do with basic principles of the “free market.” They collude together to manage the currency, the banks qualify for extra-special loans at the taxpayer’s expense whenever they fuck up, and whenever they fuck up so badly they can’t actually survive, the government inevitably bails them out, sometimes to the tune of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars if necessary. This was most obvious in the case of Northern Rock, though the British government finally threw in the towel and just nationalized it properly.

Canadians can watch as they’re used to prop up banks too, though; every few years CIBC, for example, runs into serious trouble with one bad foreign investment or another. The role of the central bank is to provide low-interest loans and cash injections to people who are very rich and have made bad investment decisions; the role of the finance minister is to explain why poor people who have made bad investment decisions – or no investment decisions at all – do not deserve similar treatment because we’ve already blown the money on more worthwhile ends, like new guns.

The latest aid to the non-free market is a new injection of $240 billion in cash from a consortium of national banks ready to bail out risk-taking investors and banks. On the bright side, my miniscule investment portfolio made a couple of dollars today as the markets careened upwards in response to the latest government welfare project.

The downside is that the Bank of Canada is giving away $4 billion as part of its contribution to the new welfare package. The U.S. is contributing the lion’s share, at $200 billion. This will be done by giving banks decent loans or exchanging the money for bank debts which CBC generously calls “less than stellar quality” — i.e. the dregs of the subprime credit, house mortgages, etc. Once the “exchange” is done, we the people will have assumed debts that often won’t be paid off, and the banks will run off with the money. I’d say they’d run off to the bank with the money but, well, they are the banks.

Every Canadian just contributed another $130 to prop up the “free market.” Fortunately we’re all rich and don’t need that money for anything else.