This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, November 25, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

That big 700 billion dollar bailout has cost us plenty.

It possesses limited prospects for achieving its stated goals.

It's a dramatic intervention in financial markets. It might even worsen economic conditions.

But does the bailout even pass constitutional muster?

The Uyto Institute Chairman Robert A. Levy says no.

Every exercise of government power has to find a home within the Constitution. That's the very nature of the

government that the framers established. It's a government of enumerated and

delegated powers. And the Tenth Amendment tells us that if the power is not

enumerated in the Constitution and not delegated to the national government,

then the national government doesn't have that power.

So you can look through the Constitution and you will not find anywhere within the Constitution

the power to socialize a significant portion of our GDP,

effectively injecting private capital

into banks, insurance companies, mortgage companies, and the like.

This is beyond the pale.

This is something that the framers never envisioned, and it is not within any power that's set out in the Constitution.

What have members of Congress or Paulson or President Bush themselves said about that?

Have they even suggested the...

Have they even invoked the Constitution? it's more like what people like me suggest that they might have said if they had said something because indeed they haven't said a thing

constitutionality hasn't even been on the radar screen.

But what they might have said, although I reject the argument, but nonetheless to make the

...