Did anyone notice that the U.S. just socialized the mortgage industry? That almost everyone who buys a home will be doing it through the federal government? Yet....yet...a single-payer health care system is too costly, too intrusive, too communist.
Maybe this takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae was necessary. I certainly don't know enough to say. I've heard that their collapse would be more devastating than the collapse of Japan or Great Britain's economy. If that is true, I guess something had to be done. I will take you at your word, Mr. Fed.
However, I still have a question - what took place in the last however many years to make it so that two companies grew to such an untenable size that they could not be allowed to fail? I was under the impression that capitalism was about risk and competition - that on some Platonic/Taoist level, the possibilty of success cannot even exist without the possibilty of failure, and yet, in regard to these companies, failure cannot be allowed to happen. How is this healthy - from an economic standpoint? More importantly (and I would love to hear this addressed in the upcoming debates) is what policies have allowed certain industries (finace, telecommunications, energy) to grow at such an egregious pace so as to outstrip the basic principles of competition and what policies could be taken up to contain and curtail this growth? Or are we all just ready to abandon the concept of nations for the concept of conglomerates - a system unlike democracy in that instead of one voice-one vote, we get a system of one dollar-one vote.
Capitalism at its purest heart is democratic - anyone can participate. What we're seeing now is not capitalism at all - it's economic tyranny.
