Earlier this week, in my capacity as a private citizen and voter, I strongly urged my US Representative and Missouri's two US Senators to vote against the Bush administration's "bailout" proposal for Wall Street's financial sector.

As a candidate for Congress, let me make my position clear:

I don't do "bailouts." I don't do corporate welfare. I don't expect the taxpayer to make good on investors' bad decisions.

If you or I visited one of the St. Louis area's riverboat casinos, plunked $10 on the number "17" at the roulette table, and saw the little white ball land on "36," neither of us complain. It was our money. We gambled. We lost. That's how it goes.

Like gambling, investing entails risk. In some ways, it's even riskier than those casino games because the odds and conditions can suddenly change based on factors it might never have occurred to the investor to consider.

Unlike casino gamblers, however, the high rollers on Wall Street seem to believe that they're entitled to a helping hand from everyone else when the little white ball lands on the wrong spot and they lose their money.

I disagree. Those who play can lose -- and the players should be the only ones who bear the players' losses.

What we're seeing with this "bailout" scenario isn't a failure of the free market (securities trading is one of America's most heavily regulated businesses). What we're seeing is "crony capitalism" -- the use of political power to "socialize" risks and "privatize" profits. Heads, they win -- tails, you lose.

Will a failure to "bail out" Wall Street have negative consequences? Absolutely. The market has been out of whack for years; now it's correcting itself, and those who believed that the housing bubble would never burst and invested accordingly are going to get hurt.

Propping up the market with gimmicks like this "bailout" wouldn't prevent those consequences. It would spread some of the pain around to everyone else, and it would put some of the consequences off a little further into the future ... giving those consequences time to grow in magnitude.

It's time for government to step back. The market is going into recession. Attempts to game our way out of that are more likely to turn that recession into a full-blown depression than to result in some kind of miracle recovery.