Mistake

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wants to extend the Federal government’s intrusion into our banking system.

Our intervention was necessary to protect the broader US banking system. And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion[.]

No, it wasn’t. No, it would not be.

Businesses thrive or fail on their managers’—individual Americans acting in concert with other individual Americans—performance or failure to perform. We individual Americans thrive, or not, on our own decisions, made out of our own obligations and determination to get ahead.

It isn’t government’s job to inure us individual Americans or our businesses from the vagaries of the marketplace or—especially—from our own poor decision-making. It’s government’s job to create and enforce a framework within which our free market can operate freely, and within which personal responsibility, whether as individuals or as business managers, can operate freely.

If our decisions are without consequence, we are neither operating freely nor in accordance the requirements of our personal responsibility.

Terrorists in the Mix

CBP agents have caught 70 illegal aliens who are also terrorists on the government’s terrorist watchlist (including one who illegally entered through our northern border). That’s just in the five months of the current fiscal year, and those 70 compare with the 98 caught in the entirety of the prior fiscal year. This year’s pace, according to my third-grade arithmetic, works out to 168 terrorists that might be caught over the full course of this year.

That’s also only the ones we know about. Left uncounted, because unknown, are the number of terrorists in the vast numbers of illegal aliens flowing across our borders that escape CBP capture and detention and those among the vast numbers of illegal aliens flowing across our borders undetected.

Nor do we know how many terrorists are among the illegal aliens that CBP does capture but that the Biden administration orders released under President Joe Biden’s (D) Catch and Release program.