The American government engaged in the largest-ever public-private transfer of wealth this last week, handing out billions of dollars to a handful of failing lending and banking corporations, and propping up several others by essentially nationalizing them, buying up the majority of their stock to make the US government the primary shareholder.

It's all part of a severe and dramatic financial crisis that is gripping the United States and Wall Street at the moment. Major financial corporations are failing, which under a capitalist system is unfortunate, but should be allowed to occur. But because these companies are so huge, and so many individual interests, careers, are threatened by their meltdown, the American government has to resort to what are basically socialist solutions in order to alleviate the pains. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad or good thing, but it does beg a lot of questions about how sustainable a major capitalist economy is in the modern era.

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