Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

America's got debt fever and the only prescription is more socialism.

Democratic administrations since FDR, particularly the Clinton Administration, pushed government involvement in home lending. They did it backed by the same kind of cheery "Every American Deserves to Own a Home" rhetoric, we're already hearing from the Office of the Imaginary President in his speeches.

But of course while every American might deserve to own a home, not every American can realistically afford to own a home. Ignoring that reality requires making a lot of bad loans, that were made with the best of politically correct intentions.

Liberal fatcats like the Sandlers got filthy stinking rich off those loans and kicked over their profits to fund and found ultra-liberal groups that would promote liberal candidates, including a certain friend of Chicago slumlords, Barry Hussein.

Wall Street firms had a ball with them until the bottom dropped out, and off they went to D.C. with their hands out. "Give us a bailout," they cried. And as corrupt and greedy as they were, they had a point. They were going back to the source of the problem.

It was government intervention that birthed the monster in the first place. From the old days of the old Democratic party where FDR used his control over banks to enforce racially segregated home loans, and created Fannie Mae, to the modern days of the Clinton and Obama Administrations, whose top officials, including Rahm Emanuel, had their dirty little hands all over it, used home mortgages to troll for votes.

Now that that monster had collapsed, instead of letting it die, the prescription for a problem caused at its root by government intervention, was of course more government intervention. Because you can just never have too much of a bad thing.

Amid all that talk about warning signs, no one had the guts to place the blame on inappropriate government involvement as the root cause, combined with the stupidity of people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford, and instead of taking responsibility, went to the voting booth to vote themselves some more Pie in the Sky, from Obama's Endless Wagon of Giveaways.

But that's the point of socialism. Why be responsible when you can just go deeper in debt and rob the taxpayer blind. It works for individuals, and for governments too.

Now the auto industry wants a bailout too. And why shouldn't they. Good old Uncle FDR rammed through the National Labor Relations Act and intimidated the Supreme Court into dropping any objections to its blatant unconstitutionality. The NLRB put unions in the driver's seat, creating a huge well funded base for the Democratic party, while strangling entire industries to death. This of course didn't matter to FDR or any of his successors, so long as the money and the votes kept coming in to the Democratic party.

America began losing industry after industry, which moved overseas to China or across the border to Mexico, or anywhere they could operate freely. Democrats responded by imposing even more regulations on industries, only accelerating the whole process. As a result the biggest growth area for union jobs is in workplaces directly funded or controlled by the government.

The automotive industry can survive one of two ways, it can jettison the UAW monkey on its back, not likely considering that the party who rakes in the union dues just won big, or it can become a subsidiary of the government, which looks increasingly likely. And that is the beauty of socialism, everything it touches fails, but never actually collapses or dies, until the whole socialist beast itself perishes. Which means you can safely expect more bailouts and a lot more regulations, keeping the environmentalist and the 75 dollar an hour union worker happy, while ripping off the taxpayer with both hands, and killing what's left of the American auto industry by a slow death.

Socialism means never having to make the tough decisions, except when you have 3 beds and 4 patients, and as patients in the UK and Canada know, no amount of noble speeches will fix that. Failure is the free market's warning system. If you're going the wrong way, you'll find out when you see all the cars swerving the other way and see the guard rail coming up ahead. It may hurt, but if you use your head, you've got a good chance of surviving it.

Socialism by contrast has no warning system. The windows are hung over with black cloth and the only time you figure out anything is wrong, is when you're already plummeting over the cliff. Instead of a crash, life becomes grim, shortages become constant, finding what you need, whether it's medical care, transportation or food, becomes first a struggle and then requires living outside the law. And yet the television chirpily keeps telling you that things couldn't be any better. Yes we can folks, yes we can!

Socialism is the answer to a very simple equation. If you refuse to take responsibility for yourself, someone else will take it for you. If millions of people grow used to the government taking responsibility for them, we call it socialism. But who becomes responsible for the government? The answer is no one. In totalitarian socialism, blame is passed down the line to the weak. In bureaucratic socialism, the blame is buried in the paperwork. And on the rare occasions that failure is admitted, what follows is a call for more of the same.

But the debt still piles up and things still get worse. And you can only bail out so much water, before you have to admit there's a hole in the boat. You can only bail out so much money, before you admit that there's a hole in the system, and the money can only have value, so long as everyone keeps ignoring the giant hole. Guess how long that works for? Try and guess, if you get it right, there may be a Nobel Prize in Economics in it for you.

There are two solutions to the current crisis, either the the government restores responsibility to its citizens and the free market, or the government will devour the citizens and the free market to create a vast financial and regulatory shell game that will end with the collapse of the entire system. There are no shortcuts around responsibility, only different ways of getting to the same place. And the longer the trip, the more painful the  final destination.