Sen. Richard Shelby, LOL*

We normally don’t spend much time praising elected officials here at OpenMarket, but I have to make an exception (this week, at least) for Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama. Over the weekend he appeared on TV and trashed the seemingly endless series of financial services bailouts, making the case that if these companies are incapable of functioning without billions of taxpayer dollars, the government should simply let them go into bankruptcy:

“Close them down, get them out of business,” Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, said on the ABC television program This Week With George Stephanopoulos. “If they’re dead, they ought to be buried.”

Finally, a sensible response. To paraphrase a Fox News commenter from last week, how is it that Treasury officials and banking gurus keep telling us that companies like to AIG are “too big to fail”? If you can’t continue to exist without a continual cash lifeline from the U.S. Treasury, you’ve ALREADY failed. All that’s left is an empty husk being refilled with more and more deficit spending. For his honesty and disregard of the self-interested Wall Street types who simply want more government money, Sen. Shelby wins this week’s coveted *Least Objectionable Legislator award from OpenMarket.org. Keep up the good work, senator!

Thanks to our own Wayne Crews for creating the LOL Award. May it be more often deserved!