Right vs Privledge

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Bailout Blues

The whole thing is very well worth reading, but the bottom line here, as it is in so many things is that those that EARN IT have the PRIVILEGE of home ownership. When you try to make something that is NOT a "right" into one, you risk your economy learning that nature provides very few rights, and those are the ONLY rights that are guaranteed.

Any reader who has followed me for some time will guess that I am
appalled by the (purported) $700 billion bailout that U.S. President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have organized, yet cannot reasonably oppose it at a moment when the markets are close to a true meltdown. I am further appalled by the spectacle of the Democrats in the U.S. Congress, exploiting the emergency to affix massive quantities of poorly disguised pork to the blunderbuss bill.

And finally, appalled by the media and chattering heads calling the whole mess a "crisis of capitalism" when the plain facts show the opposite. The whole "subprime mortgage" instrument was invented by bankers specifically to assuage heavy-handed Congressional demands to swell the number of minority and low-income homeowners, 20 years ago. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were already bloated quasi-government
bureaucracies, dangerously freed from many conventional market disciplines. And among the chief beneficiaries of the current bailout are the most extravagant contributors to the Democrat Party.

As one of my more knowing correspondents put it: "Wall Street loves money but hates free markets, because free markets distribute economic benefits to those who earn them, rather than to those best able to seize them."

The capitalist investment bankers stand accused, rightly, of having invented brilliant kiting schemes -- ultimately to deliver credit to customers who hadn't earned it. Their "greed" is irrelevant -- everyone is trying to make money. The point is that the schemes themselves were basically unsound. The lesson is that when home ownership is considered a "right" instead of a privilege, it is not only the housing market that goes bottom up.

This is a lesson no one wants to learn, so it will take time to sink
in. But any attentive reader of the Wall Street Journal can know today,what his neighbors may never even hear tomorrow: that this marketcrack-up, like every other, came not from observing the basicprinciples of capitalism, but from trying to deny them in the face ofnature.