George Dubya Bush said that he’s “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” but there’s a problem with abandoning your principles in order to save them:  in the process of saving them, you’ve, uh…abandoned them!

Not surprisingly, this “necessary” bailout that is supposed to prevent disaster by sprinkling people with magic money that solves all problems and has no negative consequences has had some negative consequences.  Note to big-government liberals:  this is what happens when you take ideas off of paper and put them into action in the real world.

In other words, when you start throwing money at companies because they need “saving,” a ton of other bad companies that are failing are going to come knocking at the door.  Why?  Because the money’s flowing and plentiful.

Only this time, the riff raff who show up with their hands out won’t be as financially important as the big banks.

No, they’ll be that cornerstone of 20th Century communication – newspapers.  (Yeah, they still print those on paper).  Michelle Malkin chronicled the rise of the hobo newspapermen:

It was supposed to be a joke. As an endless parade of corporate beggars marches to Washington in search of handouts for their beleaguered industries, some of us in the news business snarked that journalists would be next in line. I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after the New York Times company’s bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal.

The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise of preserving the “public interest.” But now, in a rather unfunny turn, the newspaper bailout push has actually come to pass.

The Republican governor and the Democrat attorney general of Connecticut went on the record last week in support of government intervention for failing local newspapers.

When you give something for nothing, you often think you’re doing people a favor – and many times you are.  But when the government uses “something for nothing” as a way of affecting the economy, there are all sorts of negative, unintended consequences.  Perhaps we should stop pretending that spending tax money solves all problems.