Our government's recent series of moves designed to help bail out the reeling financial sector from past miscalculations and indiscretions, as well as its willingness to grant an audience on Capitol Hill to representatives of the desperate automobile industry, represents a major shift from the free enterprise principals upon which this capitalistic nation has been built.

In a more traditional situation, corporations are made to understand that the only way to achieve success is to make wise fiscal decisions and pay close attention to their bottom line. Companies that do not act responsibly are forced to suffer the consequences, even if those consequences are insolvency and liquidation. Seldom do governments that practice laissez-faire economics intervene in the daily operations of independent businesses to ensure their success.

Capitalism in its truest form, the capitalism of Smith, Hoover and Darwin, allows mismanaged companies and institutions to fail. It is not the government's job to save them.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, however. To keep the economy and markets from teetering off the brink, Congress pushed through a huge $700 billion bailout bill (the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP) at lightning speed with minimal hearings or debate.

While some don't see these moves as contradicting the capitalistic values of American enterprise - Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told "60 Minutes" that Congress is "not propping up companies we're propping up individuals. The world doesn't consist of companies. The world are [sic] people. The country is people" - many others maintain that these welfare efforts run counter to the economic philosophies the nation's founding fathers held so dear.

Whether or not these moves produce their desired result remains to be seen. What is clear is that the motive behind this philosophical shift in economic policy is the plain fact that the banking and automotive sectors play such a central role in the overall health of our economy.

Advertisement

Without a strong banking system, the economy will not grow. Individuals as well as businesses would have difficulty accessing the funding needed to make purchases, both large and small. Companies must have access to capital in order to invest in the expansion and development of their businesses.

The ill health of Detroit's Big Three automakers poses additional challenges. There, the issue lies primarily in the threat of unemployment, not only for the carmakers' own workers but for the many businesses whose income depends heavily on the auto industry. Tens of thousands of jobs are at stake.

Sadly, our government's willingness to infuse huge amounts of capital to buy toxic mortgages and jumpstart lending (or was it to facilitate lending while leaving banks to fend for themselves with their sour mortgages? - even former treasury secretary Henry Paulson couldn't seem to figure that out), while perhaps necessary, has clearly taught a terrible lesson to the American people.

The lesson reads like this. Step one: Build a huge company that is so enormous and important that it threatens to take the economy down with it if it fails. Step two: Take gigantic risks, mislead government regulators, and lie to your investors about the company's fiscal health. Step three: Make enough money to retire for a lifetime in just a few years and leave the taxpayers to foot the bill.

Or as Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson put it, "If it's big and you don't regulate it, you end up nationalizing it."

Consider this as well, from MarketWatch.com's David Weidner: "The way many of us see it is that the bad guys in this financial crisis are essentially off the hook. The people trying to make an honest living and preserve their firms are getting smacked with fines and new regulations. Institutions built on flawed models are kept alive in the name of saving the system. Bureaucrats, many of whom bear some responsibility for the current crisis, are being embraced by the new administration."

Of course, Wall Street's greed and irresponsibility have resulted in some consequences for CEOs and other top executives. Still, their punishments have been relative slaps on the wrist for men and women who have made many millions while leading their investors, as well as the American people, to a state of near economic collapse.

Further complicating matters is that this bailout activity cannot but increase the sense of entitlement a wider range of Americans will come to feel toward their government. Already we have seen that in addition to Detroit's automakers, many others, including cities (Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix) and even a school district (Olmsted Falls, Ohio) have extended their hands for federal assistance.

(The wording of the TARP legislation makes such demands possible, including as it does "any institution...established and regulated under the laws of the United States or any state...and having significant operations in the United States." This can be loosely interpreted to include almost any institution, public or private, for profit or not.)

While TARP's stated purpose is to assist institutions, not individuals, what's to stop the average citizen from attempting to use Uncle Sam as an insurance policy against his own personal travails?

Say, for example, an individual makes some poor stock investments to the tune of a loss of $50,000. Why should he not be able to turn to his lawmakers and ask for some bailout funds to cover losses?

Or, take a scenario where an individual purchased a home at the peak of the real estate bubble and is now holding a mortgage that exceeds the current value of his home. Why shouldn't such a person be able to call Capitol Hill and ask if there were a way to hold things over a little bit until the economy begins to rebound?

Maybe someone doesn't like the car he leased, or the cell phone he bought, or even regrets the career path he chose. We all would be grateful for a second chance, where some benevolent benefactor looks past the folly of our ways and our poor judgment to give us a complete reprieve and a chance to start over. Why should corporations be able to turn to the government in times of need and not individuals?

We are going down a slippery path indeed.

It would be instructive here to point out the Torah's perspective on this kind of fiscal irregularity. It should be obvious to us that the Torah looks disparagingly on such widespread irresponsibility and deceit ("He has shown you what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God" - Micha 6:8).

Even so, the extent to which Hashem emphasizes integrity and responsibility in the workplace and in life in general might come as a surprise to many.

As the Torah sees it, the study and practice of economic matters - the primary focus of this week's parsha - is not only a matter of necessity for civil social interaction, but the basis of such noble objectives as piety and wisdom.

"He who wishes to be pious," said Rav Yehuda (Bava Kama 30a), "must fulfill the laws of nezikin [damages]."

"He who wishes to be wise should engage in the study of civil laws," said Rabbi Yishmael (Bava Basra 175b), "for there is no branch in the Torah that is more comprehensive than they, and they are like a welling fountain."

So integral is such fiscal truthfulness that it stands as the basis of the very first question a person will be asked when he meets his Maker.

Rava said (Shabbos 31a), "When man is led in for judgment [in the next world] he is asked, 'Did you deal faithfully [i.e. with integrity], did you fix times for learning, did you engage in procreation, did you hope for salvation, did you engage in the dialectics of wisdom, did you understand one thing from another?' "

Interpersonal ethics also hold the key to an individual's personal salvation.

Resh Lakish (Shabbos 31a) said, "What is meant by the verse, 'And there shall be faith in your times, strength, salvation, wisdom and knowledge?' 'Faith' refers to the Order of Seeds (Zeraim); 'your times' the Order of Festivals (Moed); 'strength' the Order of Women (Nashim); 'salvation' the Order of Torts (Nezikin); 'wisdom' the Order of Sacrifices (Kodshim); and 'knowledge' the Order of Purity (Taharos)."

According to Rashi, nezikin saves one by alerting him to the dangers of financial accountability if he causes damage to others.

Certainly the salvation we are referring to is not of the Christian variety, in which an outside source comes to lift from the sinful masses the overwhelming burden of past iniquity. Rather, we are talking about a self-driven, personal deliverance that emerges from a basic appreciation of the relationships between one's own fiscal actions and their correlated impact on others.

It is one thing to try and preserve my own economic best interests. If, however, such efforts result in enhancing personal relationships, by focusing on all of the responsibilities and accountabilities associated with such enterprise, society as a whole gains immeasurably.

This, in essence, points to the fatal flaws in Marxist thought.

On its purest levels, economic prowess can motivate people to participate in the highest levels of giving. True, the interests may be self-serving. If I am not courteous or if I deal in poor merchandise I will typically not succeed. Nevertheless, my desire to achieve economically, as well as my accountability to others, will promote social growth and harmony. However, when my efforts become so self-serving as to act recklessly with another's resources, and threaten to bring down countless others as well, then I am at complete dissonance with the Torah's message for economic harmony and prosperity.

This, I believe, is one of the great tragedies of the Washington bailout. We have given a pass to countless selfish, greedy and incompetent corporate executives on Wall Street, in the Motor City, and elsewhere.

These individuals who are largely responsible for the current economic crisis have by and large not been held accountable for their sins, with few demands for dismissal and legal action. As such, we have transmitted the message that, at least on a practical level, we are prepared to tolerate fraud and deception, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars. Certainly this is not the type of true salvation the Torah had in mind.

But the problem of accountability (or lack thereof) runs much deeper. In the months since the initial $350 billion in TARP funds were injected into the ailing economy, so many questions have arisen as to how the monies have been used that the new president has had to repeatedly promise Congress "fiscal transparency" with regard to all future spending.

A recently released report from the Government Accountability Office describes the laxity of federal agencies in ensuring that previous bailout dollars were not used to enrich failed executives or reward Henry Paulson's Wall Street friends. While the Treasury Department has established regulations designed to impose limits on executive salaries for companies that apply for TARP, there are few, if any, details about how the federal agencies will actually monitor this.

For example, TARP includes no legislative dollar limit on executive salaries of bailout recipients. Instead, it allows the Treasury to produce loosely defined "appropriate standards." And such limitations apply only to the company's top five executives; all others are to remain untouched, even those with million-dollar salaries and bonuses.

The situation is almost inconceivable. Not only did we not hold these greedy self-serving officials accountable for putting our entire economy into disarray, we even wrote a blank bailout check with scant oversight, allowing them to continue to abuse the system. (President Obama did impose some more defined limits to top-level executive pay. How he intends to police such matters, however, is anybody's guess.)

At least some government officials are beginning to blow the whistle on such reckless injustice. In the words of the (perhaps overly) candid Eric Thorson, inspector general of the Treasury Department: "It's a mess. I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing." Added House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, "The Treasury Department's implementation of the TARP is insufficiently transparent and is not accountable to American taxpayers. The Treasury Department failed to impose conditions on the use of government funds. "

One can only begin to imagine how the past few years of governmental oversight and ineptitude will go down in the annals of history. Students will read in their textbooks about the egregious mismanagement of our time and how few of the people who counted had the foresight or the courage to hold these men accountable.

Let us hope that such a lack of accountability does not permeate the very fabric of our society to the point that Americans, no longer recognizing the benefits of personal effort or the need for relationships, come to rely on external forces to pull them through their self-imposed crises.

Rabbi Naphtali Hoff, M.Ed., is an instructor of Jewish history at Hebrew Theological College (Skokie, Illinois) and serves as associate principal at Yeshiva Shearis Yisroel in Chicago. More information about Rabbi Hoff can be found at www.rabbihoff.com.