Socialism you can believe in

Obama Government refusing TARP repayment
Apparently some of the banks that were forced to take TARP money want to repay it, but this statement says it all;

Fast forward to today, and that same bank is begging to give the money back. The chairman offers to write a check, now, with interest. He's been sitting on the cash for months and has felt the dead hand of government threatening to run his business and dictate pay scales. He sees the writing on the wall and he wants out. But the Obama team says no, since unlike the smaller banks that gave their TARP money back, this bank is far more prominent. The bank has also been threatened with "adverse" consequences if its chairman persists. That's politics talking, not economics.

I have NEVER been in favor of the government getting involved in the running of private business. The role of government should be referee, not manager. Everyone talks about the greed of the bankers, but what about the greed of politicians for power. Just because one gets money and the other gets something less tangible, yet much more significant doesn't make it any less wrong.
The Govenor of Hong Kong John Cowperthwaite, from 1945-1971 was a strong believer in free market economics. During his tenure, personal tax never went above 15%, and government was regulated to peacekeeping and regulating disputes. Hong Kong export grew 13% a year, industrial wages doubled, and the number of households in extreme poverty went from 50% to 16% during his tenure. I think he said it best "...in the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgement in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster"