re: #886 American Sabra

LOL Reality? Oh NOW you admit the economy is in a shambles! I about bust a gut reading that.

Go back at LGF about 1 1/2 - 2 years ago. NO ONE on the Right would even accept that the economy was failing. People were going broke because of their healthcare, job loss and foreclosures, but no, it was all a creation of the MSM! It’s a hippie loving, media-driven Democrat commie ploy! And according to you, IT STILL IS!

When oh when will the Right accept the reality that most of us have been living under for the better part of 2 years and stop blaming the MSM and the Commie Loving Pinko Democrats? And btw, TFK and all you that scream about the evils of socialism, I’m assuming you don’t pay taxes, or send your children to public school, national parks or the library, or drive on public highways or go to public schools or collect welfare or food stamps, or live in government housing or have need for the cops or the fire department. Oh? You don’t live in a shack in the woods? Didn’t think so.

You’re the most ass-backwards group of people I’ve ever encountered aside from the Islamists. Truly. You stick your head in the sand and ignore what is directly in front of you while the other half of you wants to drop science and run the country on Christianity. The good news is that you’re a shrinking minority, as evidenced on November 4, 2008.

First, foreclosures are a symptom of a bad economy or of bad judgment on the part of lenders and borrowers. They aren’t a cause of a bad economy, and foreclosure is a necessary part of any system of home ownership that involves borrowing. If a borrower can move into a home and then stop making payments, nobody will make payments, so next thing, nobody will lend.

Lenders and borrowers made the mistake of imagining that home prices would always rise, and rise faster than inflation. If it had been somebody’s scheme, it would have been Mr. Ponzi, but instead it was a collective delusion. Delusion or scheme, it was bound to come unglued. Lenders mostly fell into this folly on their own, but the community reinvestment act broke the ice by making it legal, and in some cases mandatory, to write loans that no sober loan officer would have signed off on before the act. Loans that, of course, were bound to go bad unless the buyer got lucky and was able to flip the property at a profit.

Second, there’s a difference between having a government that does roads, public schools, national defense, and charity for those who cannot fend for themselves, and a government that takes into its own hands major parts of ordinary life. It’s not the job of the government to provide everyone with food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. The bulk of what gets done in the world gets done because people who are able to work have a reason to work, and they do what they need to do to get what they want and need. When that linkage is broken, able bodied men and women bag it and everything unravels.

The government has to step in and enslave the people to get them to do even a basic minimum of work. Presto, Soviet Union. And that didn’t work out.