Who Benefits?

Surveying the current financial crisis it is difficult to know at whom one should be the most angry. Democrats, of course, suffer from no such difficulty. At the beginning of the crisis they mounted their high horse, an animal they always seem to have close at hand, and rode it down Wall Street firing their shots at bankers, lenders, insurance companies, and almost everyone else who came into their sights. However, if they had taken more accurate aim they would have blasted themselves right out of the saddle and straight back into the Potomac where they could float down the river and into the sea with the rest of Washington's refuse.

If our politicians had the real interests of the country at heart then there would have been neither pork nor earmarks in the $700 billion rescue package. Is there still wonder that the approval rating of Congress is in the single digits? Do we really expect our bloated representatives to implement policies of fiscal probity? With all the political posturing and accusations flying around what makes us think that we do not now have government of the people, by the lobbyists, for the lobbyists?

Our current woes have long been in the making. They started with the Carter administration, with the Community Reinvestment Act, and gained momentum over the years with threats from the Clinton Justice Department and gangster tactics from ACORN, all to force lenders to lend where third parties wanted them to lend thereby going where angels feared to tread. Eventually greed took over. Greed on the part of borrowers whose financial circumstances and credit history made them eligible only for sub-prime loans that were risky for both them and their lenders; greed on the part of the lenders themselves who realized that misguided government regulation had provided a market to be exploited; and last, but by no means least, greed on the part of the politicians who expected the millions of votes of sub-prime borrowers who had now been granted the American dream of home-ownership by government bullying as opposed to earning it by personal thrift and responsibility. It is not possible to bring affirmative action standards to lending practices without courting the kind of disaster from which we are now suffering.

The architects of this disaster Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Maxine Waters, et al, are all on video-taped Congressional hearings intoning against Republican requests for more regulation in the cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as far back as 2004. However, they take absolutely no responsibility for their actions preferring to blame President Bush, Republican deregulation, corruption on Wall Street, and just about anything else that will deflect attention from their own egregious venality, stupidity, and guilt. Since hypocrisy is the lingua franca of Capitol Hill we can not expect them to relinquish office out of shame. It is the People who should give them the Order Of The Boot for they have conspired against their country casting wisdom and caution aside all for partisan political gain and personal advancement while ushering in the greatest national financial crisis in over 70 years. We have been betrayed. During his country's greatest crisis in its entire history Leo Amery, in 1940, turned on Chamberlain's Treasury Bench, and speaking for Great Britain, he lashed them with the words of Oliver Cromwell who had bellowed them at the Rump Parliament almost three centuries before: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" Who will speak for America now, Barack Obama? Somehow, I think not. That would be a CHANGE for which there is but a dismal HOPE.

According to the latest conventional wisdom, touted by the mainstream media, Mr. Obama has labored and brought forth a team of brilliant economists to resolve our economic difficulties. However, it is not brilliance but the formulation and execution of the correct policies which will be our salvation. Central Planning has long been dead as an economic theory but it is still alive and well in the liberal psyche. The Democrats are expert at exploiting crises to expand the scope of government into finance and industry and now it looks as if we are getting close to nationalizing the domestic automobile companies as well. No crisis should be let go to waste. Thus all forms of government dependency are multiplied and we move closer and closer to the kind of failed socialist state that existed in Great Britain prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher. If the Democrats and their fellow travelers think that their recent electoral success is a wholesale endorsement of all their policies, past and present, at every level of government, then they are basking in a false sense of confidence and superiority that will surely lead to their ruin but not, alas, before they ruin America in the process. Let us hope that we will not be like India. As she began to emerge from decades of poverty and economic inactivity due to the failure of central planning, one member of the government was heard to say: "It was India's curse to have been blessed with so many brilliant economists."

To avoid this epitaph all the brilliant members of Mr. Obama's Treasury should be treated to a copy of "David Copperfield" written by Charles Dickens in about 1850. There, they will discover the perpetually impecunious Mr. Micawber and should heed his sound observation that surpasses most of the fiscal prognostications heard around Capitol Hill these days: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and sixpence, result misery."