southchild

Check out John Stossel’s column today, What Happened to Market Discipline?.

It’s a great article, and it presents points that you’ll never hear from the “Mainstream Media”. Mainly, though, Stossel explodes the MSM myth that the current financial meltdown is a result of “no regulation”. You have to be really uninformed and gullible to believe that MSM and Obama “explanation” (for more background on the myth, read this).

The demagoguery Stossel describes is possible because (1) the MSM will do anything to cover for the failings and corruption of the Democrats and (2) most Americans are too economically ignorant to distinguish propaganda from fact. All of these decades of dumbing-down government “education” are paying huge dividends to the Democrat-Socialist Party.

Barack Obama says, “[Today’s economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of … an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary”.

What? Does that mean that until last week the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush.

The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn’t have qualified for mortgages in a real private market.

Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable.

Now that it’s all tumbling down, the politicians and pundits blame the free market.

It’s not simply misunderstanding. It’s demagoguery by people who will never admit that their “progressive” social policies have spawned a taxpayer bill that boggles the mind.

This is a story not of private enterprise but of cynical political opportunism. Moral hazard — the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses — is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The bailout of those companies holding bad mortgages — big-business socialism — sets us up for the next crisis.

Read the whole thing here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under General, libtopia, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.