Bernard Weinstein, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of the North Texas economy, says that we here in Denton County are “recession-proof” for at least the next six months, and we’re rooting for all we’re worth that he’s right.

Dr. Weinstein, the director of the University of North Texas Economic Development and Research Center, is indeed the economic guru in our neck of the woods. Every so often, reporters will ascend the mountain, like the Beatles, to seek his counsel. He is almost always reassuring, and, even better, he is almost always correct, which is more than could be said for the Maharishi.

In a front-page article in Sunday’s paper, Weinstein was quoted to the effect that while the United States as a whole was slipping into a recession, Denton and Denton County were not, thanks to such steady economic buffers as a thrifty county government, UNT, Texas Woman’s Uni­versity and the Denton State School. In short, the outlook for private enterprise is no better here than anywhere else, but our public institutions will help keep us afloat.

We wish we felt as good about the prospects for the country as a whole as Dr. Weinstein does about North Texas. President Bush sounded Saturday as though he had been reading Dr. Weinstein’s memos, but had interpreted them in a drastic and dangerous way.

The president announced a plan that would allow the government to buy up as much as $700 billion — that’s “billion,” with a “b” — in mortgage-related assets from distressed companies.

That’s expanding the public sector with a vengeance, but we’re not sure it’s exactly what Dr. Weinstein had in mind.

The government had already propped up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of $285 billion and had bought out insurance giant AIG for $85 billion. Now comes this newest plan, and it appears that the sky is the limit.

(Most news reports, ours included, have referred to the proposal as a $700 billion deal,” as if that was the most that be committed, but it’s not. Seven-hundred billion dollars in mortgage assets is the most the government can hold at any one time under the plan; the buyout total could end up being much higher.)

Combine those with a war that is draining us of both fiscal and human treasure, and the incessant cry for even more tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals, and we get a disturbing picture of who will be holding this very large bag.

We have no argument with the need to prop up our endangered financial institutions; we have come to accept — with some bitterness, we admit — the too-big-to-let-fail argument. But the president’s proposal, for all its brevity, is so sweeping that it gives us pause.

In the first place, its three pages contain no provisions for punishing miscreant business for the malfeasances of the past, and none to keep them from happening again.

Second — and this is what is truly frightening —  it continues this administration’s systematic amassing of power to the executive branch, a policy that has endorsed torture, shredded habeas corpus, seen the heyday of the notorious “signing order” and resulted in the ignoring of congressional subpoenas without so much as a by-your-leave.

The three-page document released Saturday gives sweeping powers to the secretary of the Treasury.

This is from Section 8 of the proposed law (emphasis ours): “Decisions of the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

We are sure Henry Paulson is a fine fellow, but we are not quite willing to commit the separation-of-powers concept to the scrap heap of history just yet.