Do you support the bailout?

weslinder · Sep 25, 2008

John Stossel weighs in:

What Happened to Market Discipline?
by John Stossel

Barack Obama says, "[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of ... an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary" ().

What? Does that mean that until last week the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush.

The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn't have qualified for mortgages in a real private market.

Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable.

Now that it's all tumbling down, the politicians and pundits blame the free market.

It's not simply misunderstanding. It's demagoguery by people who will never admit that their "progressive" social policies have spawned a taxpayer bill that boggles the mind.

This is a story not of private enterprise but of cynical political opportunism. Moral hazard -- the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses -- is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The bailout of those companies holding bad mortgages -- big-business socialism -- sets us up for the next crisis.

Maybe the Republican presidential candidate will dissent? Not a chance:

John McCain says, "We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. These actions [leading to crisis] stem from failed regulation, reckless management and a casino culture on Wall Street. ... We need strong and effective regulation ... " ().

He proposes a new bureaucracy, the Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust (MFI), which he says will "provide troubled institutions with an orderly process to identify bad loans, provide funding and eventually sell them at a profit. ... The MFI will supervise the sale of loan assets at market prices and purchase them as necessary" (emphasis added).

A government agency is going buy bad loans and make a profit selling them. Give me a break!

Irresponsibility induced by government-created perverse incentives is the culprit. For decades politicians of both parties have relieved big companies of the responsibility that market discipline would have imposed. The promise -- explicit or implicit -- to bail out companies "too big to fail" weakens market discipline. That invites recklessness.

What if the government cut Freddie, Fannie, Bear, AIG and the others loose and let them do what other businesses do on hard times: renegotiate with creditors and revalue assets? Would there be another Great Depression? Not likely. What turned a recession into the Great Depression was the Federal Reserve's contraction of the money supply. I doubt they'd make that mistake twice.

Public officials say the big companies must be saved to prevent a devastating credit "lock." Really? Without a federal bailout, lending wouldn't have resumed? The market wouldn't have sorted it out? Prices wouldn't have found a more solid floor? We'll never know.

We do know that the taxpayer will buy -- Probably for too much money, because the private sellers will fool the government managers -- at least $700 billion in "illiquid" assets. Where will this money come from: taxation, borrowing or the printing press? What will that do to our economic well-being?

Crisis is the friend of the State. The politicians are desperate to be seen as "showing leadership," so we're surely in for a new round of government interventions. Watch for the equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. There'll be much posturing about how the new regulations "will keep this from ever happening again," but that's more nonsense because the root problem is not lack of regulation. It's government social engineering of the housing market, which will be unchanged.

This is the path to stagnation and poverty. As Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek taught, markets are too complicated for planners to know enough to plan them. The relevant information, scattered unspoken among billions of market participants, is beyond the bureaucrats' reach.

We do need protection from reckless businessmen. But there is only one way to provide that: market discipline. That means: no privileges, and no bailouts.
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weslinder · Sep 25, 2008

Ron Paul (via email, no link):

Dear Friends:

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.

We are in this crisis because of an excess of artificially created credit at the hands of the Federal Reserve System. The solution being proposed? More artificial credit by the Federal Reserve. No liquidation of bad debt and malinvestment is to be allowed. By doing more of the same, we will only continue and intensify the distortions in our economy - all the capital misallocation, all the malinvestment - and prevent the market's attempt to re-establish rational pricing of houses and other assets.

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over - not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.
The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments - investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day - and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection - a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end... It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects - the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
In liberty,

Ron Paul
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michecon · Sep 25, 2008

Why aren't the government getting a share of equity, that will be slowly phased out when things get stabilized?

DonnyMost · Sep 25, 2008

No.

I'd rather deal with a crisis now, than hell on earth later.

weslinder · Sep 25, 2008

Ted Poe bringing truth

Ikorose · Sep 25, 2008

I'd find a more positive use for that $700 billion in the strip club.

pppbigppp · Sep 25, 2008

weslinder said:

Ron Paul (via email, no link):
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omg, Ron Paul for president.

The email is from here right?

http://www.ronpaul.com/misc/stay-in-touch/

weslinder · Sep 25, 2008

Ikorose said:

I'd find a more positive use for that $700 billion in the strip club.
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Now there's an idea. Give the bailout to men in the form of strip club vouchers, and pass the Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Strippers buy more coke, which sends money in Colombia, Colombian drug lords buy more guns, which we make in the United States (and would suddenly be cheaper in Colombia). Jobs created, production increased, trade increased, problem solved.

pppbigppp,

I don't know. I volunteered for Ron Paul's Presidential campaign, so I got on several of his mailing lists.

pppbigppp · Sep 25, 2008

So how can I sign up?

Invisible Fan · Sep 25, 2008

This is stupid. If credit ratings agencies were kept honest, this whole credit derivatives mess wouldn't have been blown out of WMD proportions.

Then everyone would've been set on their merry little ideological ways of letting mortgage holders rot on a moderate housing downturn....

SamFisher · Sep 25, 2008

weslinder said:

John Stossel weighs in:
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Wes thank you for linking to the opinions of complete idiots who have zero expertise and literally no clue what they are talking about. Unfortunately we already have a lot of people like that on the BBS here so these links are unneccesary.

weslinder · Sep 27, 2008

I was interviewed today about my opinion of the bailout on FOX 26, but I don't know if it will air. I won't get home to watch, so someone should check. I was at a protest in a blue shirt.

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