Other right-of-center blogs have trumpeted the defeat of the rescue legislation.

You won’t find that opinion in this post. It was a terrible, awful bill. But this is a terrible, awful situation. That vote was nothing to celebrate.

In the end, passing a short-term purity test on conservative principles will prove useless if the lack of rescue legislation torpedoes the market, sinks the economy into a deep recession or even depression, and causes a sharp turn toward interventionism and statism in the United States regardless of the party that is in power after November.

The last time that the country made that turn, in the 1930s, it was 1980 before it turned back. In that sense, a vote by conservatives against this legislation was a case of cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Further, we’re not talking about a limited or isolated situation here. A collapse of credit markets and banks in the United States will inevitably spread overseas. Already, European banks are failing too.

The collapse of American credit markets will rapidly spread to global credit markets, and we will see the entire world economy freeze up. Development and growth will halt. The global economy will contract. Unemployment will skyrocket. Not just here, but in developing countries as well.

We now face a situation that will undermine if not destroy the global free market system created after the end of the Cold War.

(Read more after the leap)
If you could go back in history to the fall of 1929 and spend the 1929 equivalent of $700 billion to prevent the Great Depression, would you do it?

If you had to set aside your principles to prevent the Second World War and the rise of Adolf Hitler, prevent the unemployment of one American worker in three, and prevent untold hardship on people worldwide, would you do it?

Would you try, even if you knew that the rescue plan might not work, but that there was a chance (of unknown probability) that it would?

There are no easy answers here, whether to those questions or others more oriented to the present day, which is why so many politicians take comfort in their native ideology (like Mike Sodrel). There’s a certain noble aspiration and sense of reason there.

Others (like Baron Hill), less concerned with reason or personal beliefs, take solace in cravenly matching their vote to mere political expediency. There’s nothing noble there, and the only reason is the cold calculation of holding on to power regardless of broader consequence.