Friday, May 29, 2009

Pretty Soon, Paying Your Mortgage As Agreed May Come to be Viewed as a Charming Eccentricity

According to this article at OpenMarket.Org, the Obama Administration is pouring some $250 billion into mortgage bailouts. But at least it’s egalitarian, because the well-heeled are getting some of that gravy, too.

Perhaps, in the end, the most pernicious thing about the bailouts, the nationalizations (existing and proposed), government health insurance and all the rest is not simply the negative impact on the economy and the deterioration of important services, but the way that government largesse undermines the sense of personal responsibility by removing the means to sustain a reasonably independent way of life while imbuing larger and larger numbers of people with a sense of their own helplessness and “victimhood.” Government intervention on this scale is a primer for tyranny, be it soft or hard, and a necessary step toward the realization of that kind of society H.L. Mencken once described as “a milch cow with 125 million teats” (that would be over 300 million teats, today).

3 comments:

smitty1e said...

The ultimate "quaint eccentricity" is the 10th Amendment, a sober, conscious reading of which would seem to preclude federal involvement in mortgages.

Paco said...

What I'd like to know is how the 10th Amendment came to be treated as a sort of outmoded fashion accessory - like spats.

Jasmine Lotus said...

But aren't they getting all this money from taxpayers anyway?