If you take my money, you have to abide by my rules. Isn’t that what your parents always used to say when you were an unruly teenager? You can’t have that girl or boy in your room with the door closed. You can’t smoke in the house. You can’t have any contraband in your desk, even if you’re just holding it for a friend. And you can’t pay out billions of dollars in bonuses to your pals.

Oops, that last part just snuck in there. But the comparison is apt. These bad boys have taken a bunch of dough from the family kitty. This morning it looks like another $30 billion is going to prop up AIG, the guys who are supposed to be so thoughtful and austere that they are qualified to prop up the rest of us. And still the stories of business-as-usual in the largesse arena keep emerging. Recently Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, citing that enterprising source, TMZ, went off on one bank who had recently received a billion-dollar bundle from the Feds, only to turn around and hold its long-scheduled boondoggle in Los Angeles, featuring salmon, steak, and performances by Cheryl Crow and Chicago.

Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?

I have a simple idea to make sure they do. I suggest that part of the national plan for recovery should be the creation of a National Handout Controller. In corporate terms, this would be the guy who goes over the expense accounts of every person who works for firms that have received bailout money. I know there are probably offices that purport to do this right now. But the establishment of such a dedicated position would speak to the serious nature of the function.

You don’t have to be told how it works, not if you have an expense account and work for a company that has its head on straight. You go to dinner at a nice restaurant with a client and have a $300 bottle of wine. You get a call. What’s up with the wine? Wasn’t there a $100 bottle that would have impressed your companion just as much? You order Castle Wolfenstein for your cell phone, so you can kill Nazis while you wait for the next plane. You get a call. Sure, it’s only $2.99 a month, but it’s clearly personal. We don’t kill Nazis here. We make plastic hangers. And you take a $50,000,000 plane to Washington to ask for more money, every hour in the air costing thousands and thousands of dollars? Guess what. Next time, fly commercial. And you can pick up the tab for your lack of taste and judgment, too. That will be $50,000, please. The corporation will take a check.

We can sure use it.

I was at a party the other night — yes, Virginia, there are still Christmas parties – and I asked my friend Steve what he might be getting his friends and loved ones this festive  season.

“Well,” he said, “I was thinking about getting them stock in some really great companies. You can get some incredible deals right now.”

I thought this was pretty brilliant. I asked him how he came to this idea, which would help some beleaguered companies while at the same time make innocents who still believed in the market and other children very happy.  

“I was at the St. Regis hotel just last night and I bought a pack of cigarettes,” he said. “It occurred to me that I could get, like, four shares of Ford (F) for the same price. The only problem is that I can’t figure out how to get actual stock certificates. You’d want that if you were giving out the stock as a present.”

He has a point. It is tough to get actual paper now if you buy a stock, unless you use a service like oneshare.com, and they charge a hefty transfer fee. Why not revisit the no-certificate thing? It’s possible that some companies should revisit that policy. You could offer actual paper shares in a variety of corporations for less than what it sets you back to buy a magazine or two at the local candy store or airport news stand. It wouldn’t be hard to sell them at such locations, as well as at Wal-Mart, Target and other big box establishments.

Don’t you get kind of misty just thinking about it? Little Bobby and Jenny wake up on Christmas morning. Santa has been there! The cookie plate left for the jolly, fat fellow is empty, the glass of milk drained. And look! There under the tree are the gifts – a new GI Joe doll for Bobby, a motorized monster truck for Jenny. But what they’re really excited about are what’s in their stockings — candy and little plastic toys and yes! Shares of General Motors (GM) and Citibank (C) and even Yahoo (YHOO)! Oh tidings of comfort and future value! And so ridiculously reasonable, too!

Let’s make this a merry and happy holiday season for all the needy around the world, including the fine companies whose stocks are stupidly undervalued by the moronic times in which we live.

And you out there presiding over such enterprises: Think about whether there might be a new growth model here. For once you’d be selling something worth more than what you charge for it, and creating a whole new bunch of folks who hold a little stake in your future. That’s a gift that keeps on giving.

I am thankful that Citibank will not fail. I’m a sissy. The idea of big institutions lumbering to their death scares me, particularly when they hold my life savings. 

When the Founders got together to establish this great Republic of ours, they had certain clear goals in mind. Here they are:

• form a more perfect Union,
• establish Justice,
• insure domestic Tranquility,
• provide for the common defense,
• promote the general Welfare,
• and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

Throughout our history, this vision of what government should do has changed, grown and shrunk depending on the level of heart, spleen or brains any given generation of the ruling class has under their wigs, vests or pinstripes.

For instance, back in the 19th Century, “promoting the general welfare” might very well have meant keeping the poor locked up in houses especially designed to keep them off the streets, and to start children working at jobs that stunted their growth by the age of eight.

We don’t do that any more, pretty much. Since the 1930s, it’s been pretty much the common assumption among decent Americans that it’s better to provide a safety net for people, that no matter what philosophical universe you inhabit it’s not good for children to go to bed hungry or to have the poor parts of town burn down every ten years or so.

Same for old people. They tend to need more medical care than others, so Government provided a program to make sure that when they get sick they don’t have to wander around with a tin cup and cane pretending to be blind like they used to do.

Education, too. At some point a while back, it became clear that not everybody could afford to send their kids to private school, so somebody got the idea of creating schools that anybody could go to for free. We all pay for them, of course, some of us more willingly than others, in the form of taxes.

And forget about the whole “provide for the common defense” thing. The Government could probably provide every single one of us with a nice Z3 Roadster if we didn’t have to do that.

As society grows and changes, then, our idea of the proper role of Government — what it needs to do to protect the needy, the weak, the powerless, the downtrodden, the huddled masses and their friends — mutates and shifts along with it.

Today we can add another group to the list of those who require intercession by We the People: Big Banks that have mismanaged the deposits entrusted to them by their customers. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars to once-proud burghers like Citigroup (C), Goldman Sachs (GS), Bank of America (BAC) and JP Morgan Chase (JPM). It seems like a small price to pay to make sure that none of these banks go hungry, or are forced to spend a night on the streets begging for the price of a martini — which can go as high as $20 in many major cities.

Many of us complain about Government and how it’s gotten too big, or intrudes too much on the free markets that we love so much. Now many of those who have complained the loudest are breathing a sigh of relief that Uncle Sam has once again opened his heart and his pockets to them in their time of need.

They’re first right now in the big breadline.  Let’s hope they leave a few crumbs for the rest of those who need a bit of a hand now and then.

Our fearless leader is in Saudi Arabia right now, doing a variety of things including, I bet, making sure that the family positioning is well set-up for the days when he is no longer in the best/worst job in the world. His dad does that quite a bit. And, I believe, his brother, too, come to think of it. The whole Bush family is over there all the time, sometimes working for the Carlyle Group, other times just to see the sights, I guess. I don’t know why this is, but I’m sure it’s good for the nation in one way or another.

In that vein, I was pleased to see that while he was sunnin’ and funnin’ with the guys who get all the best tables at the hottest lunch spots over there, he took some time to plead with the powers-that-be in the world’s most oil-rich nation to keep the price of crude down.

“Oil prices are very high, which is tough on our economy,” Bush said, according to AOL. “I would hope, as OPEC considers different production levels, that they understand that if … one of their biggest consumers’ economy suffers, it will mean less purchases, less oil and gas sold.”

This makes a lot of sense to me. If prices go up, people lose their ability to buy more. Demand goes down. This hurts everybody. I don’t know why people haven’t thought of this idea before. Like, in my view, many prices are too high. Why shouldn’t we, the consumer, take a tip from President Bush and politely ask those who control the supply to give us a break?

Just a few years ago, for instance, I remember when the most expensive hamburger you could get in New York City was about $80. Now there are places in midtown where you have to spend up to $400 for a small meat patty. True, it is stuffed with foie gras, but still. That’s a lot of money. I think I’m going to go down there tomorrow and ask them to have a heart. It can’t cost them more than twenty bucks to get that puppy onto the plate. Why make it so prohibitive? Stuff like that is almost impossible to put on my expense account, yet I need to impress clients just as much today as I did yesterday.

The same can be said of so many things we need to get ahead in this business life. Movies in our hotel rooms, for example. Right now I’m at a boondoggle in the middle of nowhere. Dinner is usually over at, like, 10:00 PM. You get back to your room, you want to have a little entertainment, and the movies are $14.99! Everybody knows you can’t expense movies in your room. They are the one line item that kicks right back to you. You could actually pass the acquisition of a camel through the eye of Finance more easily. That’s fifteen dollars right out of my personal pocket, just to see a movie I fall asleep in the middle of. Tomorrow morning I’m going to march right down and tell the hotel management that if they don’t cut the price for this service, I’m going to stop using it and I’m sure others will too.

This gets better and better the more I think about it. Hotel rates. Car services. Shoes, even. The things we need to get ahead in this profession of ours cost a lot, and that’s fair, but enough is enough, right? We stop paying? They stop being able to charge so much.

The only small problem I see is that if I refuse to pay their crazy prices, won’t there be people from other economies that are doing better than ours to take up the slack? Like, today Citibank (C) and Merrill (MER) are both getting infusions of money from places like Korea and Kuwait. They seem to have plenty of money over there, for some reason. That crazy restaurant with the insane burger is filled with business people from all over the globe, sucking off of their multi-national corporations. And when it comes to oil, aren’t there other countries that will pay whatever it costs, where the economies are growing faster and the need for oil is just as great? What do you think the Chinese, for instance, will say about higher oil prices? Will they ask for a cost reduction too?

Anyhow, thanks, Mr. Bush, for trying. And while we’re at it… could you cut my taxes, please?