Andrew Zahn of the MoneyNet Daily posted an eye-opening essay — one that surely took a good deal of courage in the face of a likely barrage of hate mail to follow — on the mortgage lending mess in this country:
Analysts point not to greed, but to social activist politics.
In this day and age, this is just as plausible as the others most commonly proffered by Big Media for the ongoing mortgage lender mess. It’s easy and popular to blame “corporate greed” and mismanagement since egregious examples of some of each clearly do exist. For the record, I do disagree with Zahn’s implication that greed and mismanagement are negligible factors. AIG, Lehman, WaMu and Enron wouldn’t have ended up like they did without colossally inept management.
But it’s wise to look deeper into the source of the problem, and upon doing so, we shall unearth another common denominator of at least equal culpability. The racial quota/preference factor cited by Zahn probably is a significant contributor. After reading that article, I don’t understand how it couldn’t be, logically speaking.
Mortgage eligibility should be based entirely on ability to pay, not on race, color, gender or creed. If I’m lending a hundred bucks to someone, I absolutely don’t give a damn what their color is. It’s whether I believe, based on all available evidence and familiarity with that person, that they can repay. Sadly, such simple common sense hasn’t followed in the mortgage industry, where far, far more money is at stake! History has shown that anytime we systematically discriminate against or for people because of their race, bad things happen; and this could be a sad example.
Whatever the cause, far too many banks lent to far too many people who had no business with a home loan. To give a mortgage to someone with crappy credit, unstable employment or insufficient income — no matter their color or background, no matter who is pressuring them to do so, no matter the “noble” reason — is absolutely irresponsible. Magnify that by many millions, and we now reap what others have sown.
And all the responsible home loan payers — with solid credit histories and due diligence in saving and spending — are paying for the reckless irresponsibility of others, in spades. Now we’re all stuck between choosing a partial form of socialism (Federal buyouts and takeovers of private institutions) and utter economic collapse. It’s like choosing whether one rather would be bitten by coral snake or giant crocodile. Thus blackmailed, we choose the fangs of socialism, the slow-kill solution instead of a certain and savage drowning, and hope someone will deliver antivenin soon.
Now that we are are about to become a more socialist nation, this partially accomplishes a longstanding fantasy of the San Francisco/Boulder/Berkeley/Harvard crowd, for whom nothing short of full communism truly will satiate a gluttonously Marxist socioeconomic appetite.
Thanks to JEvans for yet another thought-provoking link.
tornado says
Now that we have become a more socialist nation, and the Chosen One has been placed into office, and the bailout money is flowing in torrents of Noah’s Ark proportions to all manner of historically irresponsible entities, comes this video revolt against the insanity — the Chicago Tea Party.
Chicago Tea Party
It’s about time.