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Sunday, September 21, 2008

Stupid, Venal Government

The financial turmoil is most immediately the result of falling housing prices. Prices are falling in part because they were pushed to artificially high levels through myriad government policies aimed at controlling land use and making it easier for people with little income and no creditworthiness to get mortgages. They had to come down sometime. So now the government is committing around a trillion dollars of the taxpayers' money to bail out the lenders and investors. How is this supposed to fix things? By stopping the fall in housing prices and getting them rising again -- artificially.

Is it stupidity or venality? It could be both, couldn't it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not stupidity. Definitely not stupidity. Not sure about venality either, unless avarice falls under venality. Might be more like desperation to preserve the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Reminds me of Sopranos episodes where Tony knows he has to pay his own bills, so he squeezes the people under him.

Taxpayer is a fancy euphemism for slaves held at gunpoint. How much value will the government extract from said slaves? As much as they possibly can.