As a nation, we've decided that we no longer trust the free market. We've been burned! The market failed to protect us from our own greed and rank stupidity. So from here on out, we've decided (or at least the politicians who 'represent' us have decided) to put the government in charge of the markets. WHAT????!!!!!!
What has government ever done--EVER--that would lead us to believe that this is a good idea? Ever? The short answer is NOTHING. But rather than engage in a subjective analysis of history, let me direct the wrath of this rant at what the government is doing with our tax money today.
Today the government has turned its attention to the housing crisis. A brief history: Basically, a whole bunch of greedy, short-sighted financial institutions driven by government legislation, gave out exotic home loans to a whole bunch of unqualified and even more short-sighted people who had absolutely no business buying a house (much less the houses they bought) and couldn't afford to pay the mortgages. This under the negligent eye of the Bush administration and on the wings of legislation championed by Barney Frank to help the "economically disadvantaged" get into a home loan. The result is the present deep and deepening recession. Who would have thunk? Both the financiers and those they over-financed were profoundly unwise and deserve to be dropped on their financial noggins.
But is the government going to let the market run its course and allow stupid financial institutions to fail and stupid house buyers to default? No, it would be too painful and the market cannot be trusted. Barney Frank and his congressional cronies, on the other hand, can. Mysterious.
The plan is to bail-out the people who can't afford to pay their mortgages. And who's going to bail them out? The government? And where does the government get is money? That's right, from people like me. Hard working people who were smart enough not to buy what we couldn't afford with money that wasn't ours. So now we'll be paying our mortgages and the mortgages of a bunch of instant-self-gratification idiots who got in over their heads in homes they couldn't have afforded with a -4% interest rate.
Back when he was pushing his loans-for-everybody legislation through congress, Barney Frank--one of the small, truly disappointing figures in all of congressional history--was concerned with being fair to all the economically disadvantaged out there who couldn't afford a house. Never mind that there were good reasons they couldn't afford a house. The government needed to ensure equality!
And since its plan for equality then has backfired, the government's plan for equality now is to penalize people like me who have unfair advantages. So now, in the name of fairness and equality, I'm being forced to pay for the unfair advantage my HARD WORK and COMMON SENSE have given me.
What an absolute crock! Hey Barney, if I stop paying my mortgage now, can I get some of that government bailout money, you retarded Elmer Fudd Oompa-Loompa?
Seriously, what are we doing here? We're promoting bad behavior by rewarding it! Once upon a time in America, it was embarrassing to take a handout. Now it's a legislated expectation. Oh, I know. I've seen the talking heads on TV explaining how we're all in this together and if the government doesn't take money from people like me to bail out the flunkies then we'll all go down together.
Well, I've thought about that and you know what...let's dance! If it's a choice between getting my teeth kicked in now and being bled dry paying for flunkies over the next 50 years, then I say bring the pain! Let's get this over with! Let's all go down together--flunkies too! It's about time somebody who actually deserves to pay for their mistakes starts paying. And if that means I have to suffer along side the idiots, so be it. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life--nor do I want my children to spend the duration of theirs--paying off immoral imbecile debt. Let's do this now!
But we won't, will we Barney, you beady-eyed lilliputian? No, we'll rob from productive people to underwrite sloth and indigence, and go socialist in the process.
1 comment:
I don't understand the politicization of the housing crisis. Both major parties have long sought to make housing available to the poor. And I hear a lot about "being fair to all the economically disadvantaged out there who couldn't afford a house" but haven't seen a whole lot of evidence that those people (and they most certainly exist) are the crux of the problem today. It seems that more of the problem comes from the house-flippers, from the decent-off people living in the McMansions, and from everyone else who has been using real estate as a risk-free investment with high returns.
Furthermore, I lay most of the blame at the feet of the lenders, who have not respected the "rules of the game" by accepting stated-income, giving loans to people who clearly weren't qualified, and then taking their cut, packaging them off, and selling mortgages bundled and labeled as quality instruments with high credit borrowers. People should be smart enough to know what they can afford, for sure, but lenders should be the gatekeepers to keep the idiots away from the loans (and thereby keeping interest rates down for everyone who is qualified).
As for government involvement, spot on. Our government has an embarrassing track record of failure and worsening problems.
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