The day after Obama won the election, a Republican friend of mine on Facebook joined a group that planned on getting together on Inauguration Day to mourn 'The End of Capitalism as We Know It'*.

Members of the group were waxing bitter in the message board, complaining about how Obama was a socialist who was going to destroy the U.S. economy.

I had to laugh ... and cry.

Cry because these people were so caught up in their own right-wing economic philosophies (many of which I actually agree with) that they couldn't even for one moment take the time to appreciate the historical significance of what this country's voters had just done.

No matter what your politics, every one should be able to do what John McCain eloquently did on election night: Recognize that this country has taken a large, profound step to move past its racist beginnings (and recent history) and elected a candidate that preached unity and bipartisanship and re-engaged vast segments of the American people by inspiring a renewed sense of hope and idealism.

But many of Obama's opponents don't even want to give him a fighting chance. They believe he is doomed to fail and his liberal agenda will cause the collapse of the American empire and its glorious capitalist experiment ... which is why I also had to laugh when I read those messages.

That experiment has already failed. The empire is already collapsing. Socialism is already here ... And it all happened under a Republican administration.

Just today, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson generously let the American people know that after careful deliberation, the $700 billion he asked for from Congress is now going to be put to a vastly different use than was originally intended.

Money that was supposed to be used to buy up bad loans and mortgages rotting away on the balance sheets of banks and gumming up our credit system is now going to be doled out  (in a command-control style, I may add) to buy stakes in troubled banks, as well as potentially help out a number of as-of-yet unspecified companies in as-of-yet unspecified non-financial industries.

(So much for the program's name: TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program. Calling it the Tits and Ass Relief Program would have made about as much sense).

Mark my words: The cost of this program will end up far exceeding $1 trillion (though we may eventually get some of that money back). And that's in addition to the hundreds of billions the Fed has already spent trying to buck up our decrepit financial system.

Instead of facing the consequences of a decade-long U.S. consumer spending binge, which was encouraged and exacerbated by a housing/credit bubble caused by our government's easy money policies, we are flailing around haphazardly, trying anything and everything to bail our way out of this mess. But all we are doing is throwing good money after bad, and leaving future generations of Americans an enormous, crippling pile of debt.

The most egregious example of this will likely be the auto industry bailout that is quickly becoming a political inevitability. Right now, the best I can hope for is that the money comes attached with some sort of regulatory plan and set of conditions. If changes aren't made to the auto companies' operating structure (i.e. mainly, a renegotiated contract with the labor unions), they'll be facing the same dire situation a few months down the road because they just cannot currently compete with the lower-cost manufacturers in Japan and throughout the rest of Asia.

Do I think an auto bailout is a good idea? No way. I'd much rather see GM and Ford be allowed to go bankrupt, and work to restructure their operations through that process, while we spend the money we'll be using in the bailout to retrain displaced workers and invest in start-ups pursuing new green energy technologies. But I understand millions of jobs are at stake. I understand that the American people would find it hard to understand why Wall Street and the fat cat elites who work there and produce nothing of tangible value got bailed out while the manufacturing engine of the country was left to wither on the vine.

The fact of the matter is, America has never been a purely capitalistic system. We came to grips some time ago that capitalism without safety nets ends up benefiting the few at the expense of the many, and will eventually destroy itself through social instability. That's why we have Social Security, and welfare, and Medicare, and public schooling and student loan programs, etc. etc.

But it is still quite ironic that the biggest government nationalization and socialist expansion efforts in decades will be coming at the end of a Republican administration that never pursued the fiscal responsibility platform of the conservative movement and is now too afraid to deal with the nasty flip side of the free market policies it espoused.

*I think that was the name of the group - I can't find it on Facebook any longer ... maybe they, too, realized the insanity of their hypothesis