Panic, therefore, panic!

When in the course of human events a purportedly democratic official demands that the people give him  $700,000,000,000 — no strings attached, by week’s end, or else — then the duly elected representatives of the people have one and only one responsible response: Say "No."

Better yet, say "Hell no."

$700 billion. Seven hundred billion dollars. Dollar sign, seven, 11 zeroes.

Seven. Hundred. Billion.

You could never count to 700,000,000,000. You could never count to 700,000,000,000 by thousands.

If you were to take $700,000,000,000 in $100 bills and lay them end-to-end, well, it might turn out to be a better use of the money than if you just gave all those bills to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in exchange for nothing more than his promise to put all that money to good use if we’d all just leave him alone.

And, yes, that’s exactly what Paulson is asking America to do. He is asking us to give him $700,000,000,000 to spend however he sees fit, without interference or question. Here is language from the Bush administration’s initial panicked anti-panic proposal:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

I’ll gladly concede that Paulson knows more about the world’s rapidly collapsing finance system than I do. That doesn’t matter. Paulson’s request violates an inviolable principle, namely, to repeat, that if a public official demands $700 billion by week’s end, no strings attached, with no democratic or judicial review of that official’s unfettered discretion to spend that $700 billion as he chooses, then you say, "No."

"No" is the only possible answer a free person can give to that request.

If you don’t answer "No," then you have to answer "Yes, Your Majesty, screw that whole experiment-with-democracy thing, we think you’ll make a fine sovereign and king and please take our money as tribute from your loyal, unquestioning subjects." I prefer the former answer, and not just because it’s shorter.

This isn’t overstatement. To hand over such a kingly sum — $700,000,000,000 — while agreeing that it will be spent without review, without accountability and without interference, is to abandon even the pretense of democracy. Period.

This holds true even if the official urgently demanding the $700,000,000,000 is the Secretary for the Prevention of Collisions With Very Large Asteroids and you can look up and see the asteroid in question hurtling toward the Capitol.

I appreciate that Very Bad Things are happening and that Someone Needs to Do Something Soon. But I still don’t want a king. So if the only alternative to the Very Bad Things is to anoint Paulson as King Henry I, then I’d prefer to take my chances with the Very Bad Things.

And, yes, I’m sure that Paulson really is a very nice and very clever man, and I’m sure that he’s sincere when he says we can all trust him not to abuse his royal powers. But if he keeps up this routine of insisting that we must trust him with royal powers then my response is to say "Come back, Aaron Burr, your country needs you."

That may be a bit harsh, but we do have one incontrovertible piece of evidence that Henry Paulson cannot be trusted to handle $700 billion of the public’s money without oversight or democratic accountability. We know he can’t be trusted to do this because he wants to do this. No one who would accept such royal powers can be trusted with them. Who, then, can be trusted with them? No one. That’s the point.

Fortunately, crowning King Henry and doing nothing at all aren’t our only options. The events of the past week seem to prove that the American financial sector is in a full-blown panic. The Bush administration is now insisting that we fight panic with panic. That won’t work.

It may, in fact, be the case that something huge and unprecedented and Very, Very Expensive will be required to save the republic. But if we can’t manage to do that democratically — with accountability, oversight and the full participation of the people’s representatives — then the thing we are saving will no longer be a republic.

Fear itself has the Bush administration scared witless, but the rest of us need not lose our heads as well. As the Good Book (the other one) says, "Don’t Panic." We can address the current crisis without giving in to the demands of terrified extortionists insisting that the only solution must be taxation without representation.