There’s a Barney Frank before, and a Barney Frank after. No, the pork-belly king hasn’t gone on a diet. But Americans probably will have to go on one, now that the $700 billion bailout has been hastily rammed down the country’s throat.

All I can say is, “Bad, Bush!” “Bad, Barney!” for taking such a hard left turn to the land of socialism when they were warned about the crisis in the housing markets years ago.

Furthermore, “Bad, Democrats!” for blaming the whole thing on the Republicans, when the Clinton administration helped stage the inevitable fallout by legislating irrational lending to facilitate home ownership among people who otherwise wouldn’t qualify.

And “Bad, Bolivia!” “Bad, Brazil!” for blaming the whole financial crisis on capitalism.

Dr. Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute, provides a good explanation of the real underlying causes of the biggest financial threat to this country since the Great Depression. This whole greasy mess is a direct consequence of a conglomeration of governmental initiatives such as: artificially-low interest rates set by the central planners at the Federal Reserve; politically-motivated lending standards set by the social planners in Congress; and the artificial profit opportunities created by the financial planners at Freddie and Fannie and the SEC. It is a conspiracy of irrational market manipulations that preclude any corrective forces that would have kicked in long ago in a truely free-market.

At some point, the houses of cards had to fall down. And now we’re stuck with a botched emergency Financectomy performed on Wall Street’s bleeding wallet by a panic-stricken Treasury Secretary, President, and Congress.

And it doesn’t matter who takes over the care of this patient in November because both candidates were right there in the operating room agreeing with the chief surgeon’s basic care plan. And both blamed the crisis on some entrenched greediness of businessmen.

Hugo Chavez must feel vindicated. He even says that it’s so bad over here, America needs a new Constitution to free itself of the tyranny of big banks and corporations.

Thanks for the advice, Hugo, but I think the Constitution–even with its flaws–is pretty good already. It’s just that our leaders don’t like to follow it. It’s like they’ve missed the whole essence of it. Ayn Rand clarifies that the “Constitution is a limitation on the government…(it is) a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.”

While Hugo confuses American political power with the economic power of our quasi-capitalist system, he hasn’t missed the chance to enhance his own economic power by exercising his monopoly on political power in Venezuela. And America has been inexorably following suit.

This bailout is just the latest in a long string of Venezuelanesque growth in government: from Medicare/Medicaid/FDA…to public schooling… to Social Security…to limitations on abortion..to special programs this..to special programs that…to subsidized industries in agriculture/autos/airlines/Savings and Loans….and now to the big kahuna bailout of October 3. The greed of capitalism? I don’t think so.

But if we did follow Hugo’s advice and make a new Constitution, maybe it should start with, “We The People of the United States, who don’t want our freedoms mucked up by a bunch of central planners in Washington, want a Constitution that really means it when we say limited government…”