Let's get real with each other here for a second. Yes, sometimes big business is bad and regulating big business to make sure that it is not taking advantage of the populace is a good thing. However, trying to bail out big business and the individual with a BIG Government Mortgage Bailout program is just Bad Business.
Looking at this from a Libertarian perspective, these people chose the beds and bedrooms they were going to lay in, let them sleep in them (or out on the street in some cases). The fact of the matter is that while a small percentage of these people may have been duped, a very larger percentage of them knew what they were getting into. They signed on to foolish interest only mortgages and other such schemes in order to get into homes they could not afford. In some cases they bought houses whose prices were swollen and bloated with the vapor trail of a market gone haywire. Popular TV shows and local seminars sprung up around the country telling the average folks how flipping homes could make them a fortune off the housing market. Don't get me wrong, some people did make money, but others didn't and just like every other investment out there, they knew the risks, they took them, and they shouldn't be rewarded with tax payer money covering for their mistake and misfortune.
Speaking of this so called tax payer money, where do we think we are going to find the 10 to 20 billion dollars or more that it is going to take in government money to clean up this mess?
[ Figures quoted from US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT: http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/economy/2008/04/11/the-housing-bailout-backlash.html ]
What we are really talking about is borrowing more money from foreign governments to cover the costs of our BIG Government program. Once again BIG Government is operating like a bad business. What happened when Enron went into debt and cooked the books? Enron collapsed and took the pensions and livelihoods of thousands of people with it. Congress has been acting much like Enron since the days of FDR. It's Bad Business when BIG Government operates without a balance sheet on their checkbook. The value of the dollar is tanking around the world causing inflation, oil prices at the pumps to sky rocket, and holding the economy in a death grip preventing expansion. What caused this devaluation, a combination of Bad Business by individuals and corporations, with the other partner and larger responsibility holder being BIG Government operating as if the money were growing on trees.
BIG Government should learn from the current situation and see the writing on the wall that continuing down this path of spending more than you have will not get us out of trouble, but will instead just dig the hole deeper and deeper. We need to start by first and foremost, balancing the budget, secondly, cut spending and eliminate waste, third realize that the BIG Governments job is not to take care of everyone and hold their hands from the cradle to the grave, but rather to ensure security and the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. Lastly, we must come to rely on our rich supply of volunteerism, activism, and charity organizations in this country to help our fellow man. It's high time we expected people to stand on their own and not rely on BIG Governments Bad Business to stand for them.
We could debate the specifics such as the war in Iraq's impact on the budgetary crisis or the role the Fed has played in the artificial inflation and expansion of the economy over the last decade by cutting interest rates and manipulating the market cycle to perpetually keep us in a bull market, however, I think we are better served by simply saying to Congress and the President, it's time to start running the country's check book like your own, stop spending more than you bring in, and realize that BIG Government is Bad Business.
For more on opposing the housing bailout check out the following websites:
http://www.stopthebailout.org/
http://www.nationalbubble.com/stopthebailout
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