Pretend to Care

Arnold Schwarzenegger displayed his lack of conviction as a virtue on ABC Sunday Morning. He castigated with Stephanopoulos' assistance those who possess principles and stick to them as the new "Hoovers" of the Republican party. In Arnold world, which emerged from the let's pretend world of acting and the let's create artificial body mass with steroids of Arnold's shortcut method of body building, government must provide "everything" to the "people". This was attempted in Marxist revolutions and socialist takeovers many times in many places and has never worked. These systems are excellent at shoving the rich down the hill but can not pull the poor and middle class up it. Believing free market capitalism works built the most prosperous nation there has ever been. When government interfered with markets that naturally would have found their own equilibrium, the economic situation only became worse. The more government manipulation, the harder the markets have to work to try to correct this distortion. Obama is warping the markets where they can no longer work and depression will be the outcome. There was no dearth of regulation or law that permitted the decline to begin. There was laxity among the regulators (or in some cases perhaps complicity-it is hard to imagine in cases like Madoff and Stanford with a decade or so of warning to the SEC that there wasn't). There were the government-sponsored entities Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that distorted the markets. There were restrictions passed against the almost non-existent practice of redlining. Activist organizations lobbied politicians and used race-baiting pressure tactics, particularly ACORN and Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH, to basically extort positions for themselves and their supporters and managed with their media lackeys to create the impression that minority members were being denied loans because of their race or ethnic origin. This was almost universally not the case. The way the law was originally crafted to prevent redlining sounded reasonable enough-that a particular area could not be excluded from receiving credit and that potential borrowers had to be evaluated on a case by case basis on their own merit and not judged by the area where they lived and were applying for a loan from or where the business was going to be located that they were applying for credit to start or operate with if they were launching or running a commercial endeavor. In practice, this meant banks were giving money away to avoid public relations damage, government sanction, and litigation and if enough people receive enough money from enough financial institutions that they simply don't intend or have the ability to pay back, you end up where we are now. Of course, the bets on bets of the derivative markets pulled these sub-primes down further and faster, and regulators twiddling their thumbs when they should have been working allowed this to happen. Add in the raw criminality, unprecedented in scope, of your Madoff and Stanford and whoever has not been caught yet and a corporate structure with inter-locking boards of directors and shameless executives who green lighted every harebrained scheme and demanded and received from the board- that did nothing to protect their shareholders-golden parachute compensation packages and you end up with this-a bunch of leftists (including Snowe, Collins, Specter, and the schlock movie actor destroying California) taking away the only chance the nation has for recovery and dooming us to the endless misery of socialism.