The things I don't understand...

...would make one hell of a long list.

What I most don't understand -- aside from a couple of personal matters I won't go into -- is money.

I never did, really.

But events of recent days have left me increasingly puzzled, and a hell of a lot more pessimistic about the future.

Back in Washington, the so-called "servants of the people" are using what amounts to counterfeit money to prop up a number of companies that, in the course of making a select few obscenely rich, ran into the brick wall of Reality, which is: you can't sell what doesn't exist.

Somehow, the president and the worthless goons in Congress have decided that writing checks we will ultimately have to cash will somehow give us all confidence in our rapidly failing economy.

It seems to work for the stock market. Doesn't work for me, though.

I have a hunch a few of said goons know this is a smoke-and-mirrors ploy. That's shown by the sudden uproar over the bonuses AIG Insurance, one of the companies that has received more than $100 billion of the government's counterfeit (that is, not backed by any possible kind of asset) money, paid monstrous bonuses to some of its executives, including several who were responsible for bringing the company down.

To me, that's about the dumbest move AIG could have made. Calling this scheme part of the Money Industry's "standard practices" and insisting that it's the only way to "keep good employees" strikes me the same way Cunard laying a bonus on the Titanic's captain would.

But I can't get myself into the frothing-at-the-mouth rage politicians are showing over it. In fact, cynic/realist that I am, I'm firmly convinced that Obama, Dodd, Frank, Schumer and the rest really don't care about a measly $100+ million in bonuses. But they know the questions about their own behavior during this time are coming, that they will be scrutinized (and, in my opinion, found at a minimum deficient, at maximum cuplpable in our financial meltdown), and they want to put it off as long as possible.

The government has no place in business. Never has, never will. But the current crop of greedheads seems hell-bent on controlling every business in America. If they run them the way they have "managed" their Constitutional duties, I expect failures on a massive scale. And it won't take long.

Some people are comparing this to the scenario in Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged." And it does display some amazing parallels with that story.

Having seen American business "leaders" in action, I no more believe we will be rescued by Rand's Aryan crew of "objectivist" inventors, railroad tycoons and assorted mythic "heroes" than I expect to see our skies filled with the fleets of aeroplanes of "Wings Over the World" from the 1936 movie "Things to Come."

I would be laughing at the gross ineptitude of the so-called experts and the otherwise-unemployable gang of whiners, looters and assorted misfits in Washington, except that they are playing with our lives.

And they are making a hell of a mess of it.