Thorsten Polleit of the Ludwig von Mises Institute ,does a very good job of explaning, with examples of simple balance sheets, what the current actions of the US Government in bailing out Wall Street are doing to its citizens.
The article is not specifically aimed at the US government, but rather in general, but you can put in your favourite government as example.
We currently find ourselves in a situation Ludwig von Mises warned against:
The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration. The individual is always ready to ascribe his good luck to his own efficiency and to take it as a well-deserved reward for his talent, application, and probity. But reverses of fortune he always charges to other people, and most of all to the absurdity of social and political institutions. He does not blame the authorities for having fostered the boom. He reviles them for the inevitable collapse. In the opinion of the public, more inflation and more credit expansion are the only remedy against the evils which inflation and credit expansion have brought about.[2]
He recons there is no escaping the eventual price that will have to be paid, the only question is how high that is going to be, and quotes von Mises ,
The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
I certainly don’t hope my children would have to bear that one day.