In a similar manner our government by forcing banks and mortgage companies to be 'fair' to poor people has resulted in our current financial mess which not only affects those poor but has dragged everybody else into it as well. What happened to AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae is not because of corporate greed but because our government forced mortgage lenders to give mortgages to people who could not afford them.

THE ASTUTE BLOGGERS, 20 Sept 2008, SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT: WALL STREET GREED DID NOT CAUSE OUR FINANCIAL FIASCO, K-STREET CORRUPTION DID

K STREET AND THE DEMOCRATS ARE TO BLAME:

The entire "first cause" of our current financial fiasco is Fannie Mae and political - not Wall Street greed.

It was caused by K Street and Fannie Mae, not Wall Street and investors.

The problem is that the derivatives created by Fannie Mae (which mixed prime with sub-prime mortgages) have no transparency and are now therefore seen as worthless by the marketplace.

That many large firms on Wall Street and central banks around the world bought these is NOT symptomatic of greed - quite the opposite; they bought these Fannie Mae derivatives because of the inherent backing they got from the US Government, which made them a relatively conservative investment - you see, Fannie Mae has, for all intents and purposes, got a guarantee from the USG because it's a special GSE, and because its so large the markets knew the USG could not let it fail.

I am not saying that there were no greedy shenanigans by bankers involved but they were merely the result and not the cause of the problem. The first cause was ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which forced many banks to offer low-interest loans to those who should not have been buying homes and which organization is now asking lawmakers to backs bills to fight foreclosures against those same borrowers. ACORN made the mess and now it's asking those banks to eat the loans they were forced to make against their will.

Just as welfare keeps poor people poor so does lending money to people who cannot pay it back. It was criminal to force banks to make those loans; even the Mafia with the most usurious of interest rates will not lend money to people who cannot pay the loans back.

WorldNetDaily, Guess again who's to blame for U.S. mortgage meltdown

In a nutshell, Liebowitz contends that the federal government over the last 20 years pushed the mortgage industry so hard to get minority homeownership up, that it undermined the country's financial foundation to achieve its goal.

"In an attempt to increase homeownership, particularly by minorities and the less affluent, an attack on underwriting standards was undertaken by virtually every branch of the government since the early 1990s," Liebowitz writes. "The decline in mortgage underwriting standards was universally praised as 'innovation' in mortgage lending by regulators, academic specialists, (government-sponsored enterprises) and housing activists."

He continues, "Although a seemingly noble goal, the tool chosen to achieve this goal was one that endangered the entire mortgage enterprise."

So if you want to blame it all on the greed of bankers or the wealthy or on Republicans you are simply misinformed or misguided. This was a good-hearted, good-intentioned, Liberal/Democratic-caused mess. And as with all good-intentions, it hurts not only the poor, but everyone else as well.

Disclaimer: I was poor twice in my life. As a child, I had to start up the gas stove in the morning so that I would be warm enough to get dressed to go to school. We could not afford to keep the stove on all night. Later in my forties during a bad period I was on food stamps for two years. I know what it is like to worry about where the next rent payment will come from, but welfare, food stamps, minimum wage laws and government interference into our free economy were all the cause of my poverty at that time.

We need less government interference in our lives. Get rid of the IRS (institute a simple flat tax), stop the War on Drugs (saving tens of billions of dollars annually), stop incarcerating people for non-violent crimes (the US has 25% of the world's prisoners), allow insurance and banking companies to charge more for those who are most likely to default (that is, get rid of ACORN-induced regulations), stop taxing corporations (the US has the 2nd highest corporate tax rate among industrialized countries) which undermines our global competitiveness, stop giving foreign aid altogether except for fighting Islamic terror, drill in America so that we stop buying oil from countries that want to destroy us, get rid of minimum wage laws (which cause unemployment) so that teenagers which are almost 20% unemployed can get more jobs; and tens of thousands of other regulations, taxes, and restrictions on businesses that keep our economy from being robust.

I waste 20% or more of my company profits on lawyers, tax accountants, financial advisers, bookkeepers just to comply with hundreds of regulatory and taxing authorities. That's money I could have spent on technology, innovation, and increasing productivity so that I could do more business, hire more people, spend more in our economy and generally lift the income of the average Joe. It is NOT Democrats, ACORN, welfare or any government handout that raises men above the poverty line -- it is unencumbered business.

Germany certainly has more skilled and more intelligent workers than the US and still has a jobless rate of 8% (despite more than 23 straight months of decreases) precisely because they have too many regulations favorable to labor and against business proving that good intentions result in the opposite effect.

The same for France. All of the laws that make it hard for an employer to fire a worker has only resulted in businesses refusing to hire new workers in fear of getting stuck for life with a slacker. We recall that the French government back in 2006 passed a law, (Contrat première embauche, CPE), intended to fix the high youth unemployment rate (about 23% at the time) by making it easier to fire young people wound up with violent protests by those same young idiots who want to repeal the law because they think having a job for life is a right.

The law was put on hold while lawmakers reconfigured the law by reducing the length of provisional employment from two years to one. Although that helped a little bit, France still has a high rate of unemployment among its youth, 19.1%. Much of the protests were by university youth which shows that one can be educated and still be a moron.

If Democrats and Republicans both would kindly stop helping the poor and just leave business alone then there would be no poor to "help" out.

---

Related maxims: "Give a Muslim a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll kick you out of the ocean complaining that you simultaneously steal his fish and that you don't pay enough for the fish he sells you."

---

---