LONDON — After Comrade George W. Bush nationalized the two giants of the U.S. mortgage market, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, earlier this month, Anatole Kaletsky wrote in The Times of London that "the most capitalist administration ever, in the world's most capitalist country, (has) decided to wipe out the private owners of its biggest and most important financial companies and replace them with state-appointed bureaucrats."

Wikipedia defines "nationalization" as "the act of taking an industry or assets into the public ownership of a national government. It is a central theme of certain brands of estate socialist policy that the means of production, distribution and exchange, should be owned by the state. . . . Nationalization may occur with or without compensation to the former owners. Without compensation, it is a case of expropriation."

Well, this was expropriation. When the U.S. investment bank Bear Stearns went belly up in March, the shareholders used their political influence to get the price of the buyout raised from the originally agreed $2 per share to $10 per share. By April, however, it was known that the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was talking to the Scandinavian authorities, who had survived a rather similar crisis in 1991-93 by nationalizing their banks without compensation for shareholders.