"If the Fed can extend $30 billion to help Bear Stearns address their financial crisis," Hillary Rodham Clinton argued, "the federal government should provide at least that much emergency help to families and communities to address theirs." That's a savvy appeal to Americans' strong sense of fundamental fairness -- that if goodies go to Wall Street, then they also should go to Main Street.

Voters, like buyers, should beware. You might think that Democrats oppose the $30 billion Bear Stearns bonanza, because it's a big government bailout that rewards bad business practices.

Wrong. Like Republican presidential candidate John McCain, Clinton and her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, support the Bear Stearns deal. It's one of those things that nobody likes much, but many economists on both the left and right nonetheless support -- even if it goes against their principles of fairness or free markets.

As economist Chad Stone, of the nonpartisan but left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained to me, "Achieving an orderly liquidation of Bear Stearns without having a fire sale on assets is a good thing, especially if the people who made bad decisions have to take their lumps. The injection of liquidity by the Fed makes sense as a triage measure to be withdrawn when the crisis passes."

On the right, economist Irwin M. Stelzer wrote in The Weekly Standard, "The era of free-market, no-government-intervention purists is over, if indeed it ever existed."

The ugly fact is that some businesses are too big to fail when their demise would shake confidence in the market and assuming $30 billion of Bear Stearns debt could thwart a recession.

The question is: If Washington put up $30 billion for Bear Stearns, then must Washington, as Clinton suggested, throw a like amount at bad home loans?

For McCain, the answer is no. "I will not play election-year politics with the housing crisis," was McCain's answer Tuesday. McCain wants the government to focus on improving accounting practices, changing the law to protect lenders who want to cut deals with delinquent mortgagees and concentrating on helping only what he called "deserving homeowners." Continued...