Thomas Sowell - Lower Lending Standards, Barney Frank

I watched this video yesterday on Glenn Beck's Show. I love what he says about Barney Frank -

Sowell - "When you think about it there's no reason for him to learn any lesson from any of this, I don't doubt for a minute that he is going to be reelected, he gets credit for 'helping' particular classes of people, when the foreclosures come, he's able to blame somebody else."

Beck - "How does this end when we are a bailout nation, when we don't learn our lessons"?

Sowell - "Well people do learn their lessons in the marketplace, unfortunately there's no incentive for a politician to learn a lesson. What Barney Frank is advocating, which is to say lowering the lending standards in order that more people can have more home ownership......both parties have tried this, (he adds all the way back to the 1920s ), in all these cases the foreclosure rate went up and nobody who advocated those lower lending standards was ever punished politically....the banks did not choose to lower their lending standards, the government leaned on them. "

Sowell continues -

"The Justice Department under Clinton threatened them with prosecution if their lending patterns didn't suit the government. It was precisely the regulators that pushed the lower lending standards just as Barney Frank is now. And that is at the heart of the finanacial crisis that we are going through now."

Sowell goes on to theorize that we are doing the precise opposite, (shocker), in the government of that which we should be doing right now. Barney Frank is actually pushing for more laxing of standards while calling for the opposite. On Wednesday of last week the Obamanation announced that Fannie and Freddie would allow homeowners to refinance 125% of the value of their home, an effort to stave off foreclosures. I'm no economist but I can tell you with absolute certainty that this approach is precisely that which put us in this perilous spot in the first place. Just as is the case with any and all big-government approaches, the solution to a crisis is actually the furtherance thereof - effectively jettisoning any vestige of a possible recovery in our economy, replacing the cure with another cause. Never let a good crisis go to waste....

Barney's recent shenanigans include writing a letter to the head of Fannie and Freddie urging the two GSEs to loosen standards on lending to purchasers of condos. After the crash in the market the two government sponsored entities had tightened standards to avoid a future catastrophe. Of course he is pushing hard for exactly the same thing that caused our financial markets to come to their knees. We should expect nothing more, nothing less of the bufoons that rule us.

My head spins, thoughts consumed of such typical big-government socialistic nonsense. Our nation is run by swine, both press and government. They care not a wit for the US or it's citizens. It reminds me of shenanigans in despotic 3rd tier nations. Such meddling in housing and other areas of the free market led up to and/or exacerbated the financial meltdown that we have all suffered through in the last year. As Sowell says, crooks like Frank can do whatever they want - they don't have to face competition in reelection and the media covers for them. I would die for term limits on all members of Congress.

I ponder a distance dream of Massachusetts slowly sliding into the Atlantic, a just deserve for delivering us such heretics over our market economy - a pimple on a rat's-ass of a man, an utter disgrace that one would have such powers granted to him.