Bailing Out Failed Savings and Loans

“Let’s get government off the backs of business.” It all sounded so attractive and easy as the Great Salesman and Communicator made the masses forget their troubles and smile.

Who needed bureaucrats looking over the shoulders of “the engines of our economy” and telling businessmen how to serve the market place? Certainly not we freedom-loving Americans.

Now, in the light of the morning after and the incoming bills, eight years of absentee regulation don’t look quite as attractive.

Somewhere between $50 billion to $100 billion (no one seems to really know) to “save” S&Ls; buried in years of shoddy “free-market” practices; commodity markets awash in corruption that bilked traders out of billions more; illegal “junk-bond” maneuvers by leading Wall Street financial houses; air and water pollution; acid rain; electric and gas utility steals; and now in The Times, counterfeit nuts, bolts, fasteners, ball bearings, valves and circuit breakers in construction projects, commercial airliners, nuclear plants, bridges and school buses (Part I, Jan. 27).

Special commissions will be required to even estimate the damage done by stripping the regulatory agencies and letting their oversight authority as well as the anti-trust laws gather dust under the benign hands of the Reagan Administration and the Department of Justice. Hopefully, many of us will have learned a lesson from all this: to discriminate between phony sloganeering and realistic national policy proposals, and to learn that the fundamental differences are not those that separate honest liberals and conservatives, but those between “all of us” as against “all of them”--the inevitable larcenous unbridled connivers from whom, whether we like it or not, only the legitimate arms of honest, ethical government can protect us.

PHILIP BRAIL

Laguna Hills