Congress is running around in circles trying to figure out how to handle the hot potato the Bush Administration has handed them with its $700 billion bailout proposal, and how they can load it up with their own list of taxpayer-financed handouts.

If left to their own devices they'll turn it into a giant cookie jar instead of taking the trouble to enact the measures that will boost the economy when it is in deep trouble.

The bailout is a panic remedy designed to prop up the crumbling mortgage market by buying up mountains of near-worthless paper currently poisoning America's credit system while ignoring the root causes of the nation's economic malaise.

No matter how it's described, it is a socialistic answer to a capitalist problem. It does nothing to foster the system of free enterprise upon which America's prosperity depends.

Put simply, that system is shackled around the ankles with chains fashioned by a series of Congresses, many of whose members either don't understand the principles of free enterprise or simply despise it as a mortal enemy of the Marxist dogma many of them embrace with near-religious fervor.

The clear and simple answer to our current economic dilemma is to take those shackles off and allow our free enterprise system to function unimpaired with unnecessary bureaucratic meddling.

Turn America's economic engine loose and all by itself it will create the kind of prosperity that saw a rustic combination of 13 British colonies transformed into the wealthiest and most powerful nation in world history.

"We did it before," as the World War II song boasted, "and we can do it again."

If allowed to, that is.

American businesses and America's small businessmen and women who make $250,000 a year -- the people who create most of the jobs in the marketplace -- are groaning under the burden of corporate and personal taxation. At a corporate tax rate of 35 percent we have the second-highest in the world. Continued...