> Even if you ignore everything wrong there and just say "they eventually got some of their money back" like you did, it still matters that they printed (ie effectively stole in real terms) 4 trillion dollars that they didn't own.

Printing money might be bad policy, but how is it stealing? The U.S. has the sovereign (and Constitutional) right to create money. (Also, the Fed's job is literally to create money to meet economic targets. SOMA was unprecedented not because the government "printed money" but because it bought an asset class it previously did not buy--securities.)

> If the Fed is going to print trillions, at least buy healthcare or space exploration with it. Stop this circle jerk nonsense with Wall St.

This is again ignoring the fundamental difference between printing money for consumption, and printing money to buy assets. If the fed prints money to buy healthcare or space exploration, it doesn't get that money back. If it prints money to buy assets, it gets almost all of that money back.

This is not an esoteric or meaningless distinction. The federal government originated $1.4 trillion in student loans since 2009. Would you call that a $1.4-trillion "free college" program? Of course not. People have to pay the money back, and the government will get most of their money back. The actual cost will be about $180 billion. By contrast, the government had spent that $1.4 trillion on healthcare or space exploration, it would have actually cost $1.4 trillion.

You can argue about the merits of bailing out Wall Street. But what you can't argue about is what it actually cost the government about $100 billion, not $4 trillion.

Seems to me like it depends on what happens to the money after it comes back, if indeed it does so. If the government "un-prints" the money, destroying it, then indeed it was merely a loan from everyone that holds dollars, and not outright theft. But if that money goes back into some kind of general fund, then it doesn't matter what happened in between.

Also, I wouldn't say it's clear that healthcare or space exploration aren't assets, even in the strict financial sense you mean. What's the expected taxable value of a citizen? If you invest less than that on keeping them alive, then their life is an appreciating financial asset. Similar logic applies to space programs, if the space capacity you fail to build out ends up being something you buy from another country (as in the case of US astronauts riding to the ISS on Soyuz). And of course this is the shallowest of analyses - there are substantial additional hidden (financial) costs to letting your citizens die, or being dependent on foreign powers for space infrastructure.

The thing I find puzzling, and possibly telling, is that conventional wisdom tells us inflation ought to have spiked after the 2008 bailout. Instead it plummeted, indeed briefly became deflation. This tells us that money became very scarce. Why, after so much money was printed and handed out? Because it all went to the banks, and they essentially pocketed it and didn't lend it out. So what exactly was the purpose of doing that?

>The U.S. has the sovereign (and Constitutional) right to create money.

The right is actually with congress to have the power to do this. The Fed doesn't have any constitutional authority to do this.

Money gets its value from real goods and services. So when someone prints new money it steals that value from those who created it. The Fed likes to claim they create value, but they are just money changers.

If that's the case, Congress could simply have voted to prevent Treasury or the Fed from doing it. By not doing so, it consented.

Would you say that about every othe injustice, instance of cronyism, unconstitutionality or civil rights breach?

I would say that about most instances in which people claim an administration has overstepped in its use of authority delegated to it by Congress. The people you should be mad at in these situations is Congress.