I have an article on that very subject over at NRO today. Check it out!

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While conservatives are angry about a number of things at the moment, they should be at least as angry that the Congressional Democrats who helped stoke the mortgage crisis are getting away with blaming everyone else for it. Today, Senator Chris Dodd, the prime recipient of GSE lobbying funds and proud holder of a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide, is holding hearings where the witnesses will blame everyone but Dodd, Barney Frank and their cronies. Republicans asked to invite witnesses but…

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At the hearing being held today by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in which former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld is now testifying, an earlier panel attempted to look at the causes of Lehman’s collapse and the broader credit cirisis. And this gave an opportunity to committee members to ride their various hobby horses.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s horse and “whipping boy” was deregulation. She blamed the entire crisis on deregulation, and specifically the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that…

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The bailout bill that passed through Congress today seeks to solve the financial mess by massively increasing government involvement in private finance. But more Government cannot be the answer to a government-created problem. The fact is that short-sighted government policies distorted the market in the first place. Bankers were certainly to blame for responding to these signals from government in the hope of a quick buck, but at its base, much of the problem was caused by government.

These are the…

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Arnold Kling hits the creation of the secondary market for mortgage loans as the major factor — 50 percent — causing the current financial crisis. As Kling wrote:

In hindsight, I think that the crisis was caused by
a) creation of the secondary mortgage market (50 percent)
b) low down payment mortgages (30 percent)
c) the “suits vs. geeks” divide (15 percent)
d) other (5 percent)

The more I think about the secondary mortgage market, the less I like it. Any widespread benefits, such as lower mortgage…

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The stunning defeat of the Hank Paulson’s socialism-for-Wall Street bailout on Monday has just made planks of a pro-free market alternative much more viable. As Open Market has noted before, The Republican Study Comittee, a caucus of pro-market members of the GOP Congress, has presented such a plan that would be much more effective at stopping the contagion than the Paulson bailout, and many of its provisions would not cost taxpayers a dime.

The RSC plan is chock-full of measures to…

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Oh, Happy Day! And it certainly is for all those who value freedom, responsibility and the true free market in which individuals are free to profit from their risks on the condition that they don’t stick the rest of us with their losses.

It’s not hyperbole to say the Republican and Democratic backbenchers who defied both parties’ leadership to defeat this $700 billion package of Wall Street socialism literally saved America. Whatever their reasons, this defeat (or rather victory for freedom),…

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The bailout bill drafted by liberal Congressional leaders contains a massive slush fund that will benefit the fraud-ridden left-wing group ACORN, which must be removed, argues Investors Business Daily. (We earlier discussed the slush fund for ACORN and its history of voter fraud and financial fraud).

Investors Business Daily has a multipart series on how those same liberal politicians spawned the mortgage crisis by blocking reform of the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which used their privileged status as government-sponsored enterprises to buy up “hundreds of billions of…

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The weeks leading up to a Presidential election have always been called the “silly season.” But the attacks from bloggers and the media on vice-presidential contender Sarah Palin’s supposed “gaffe” in her reaction to the takeover of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac takes the political season to a new level of ridiculousness.

On Saturday, September 6, when the takeover and billion-dollar taxpayer bailout announcement that would happen the next day was already being reported by the press…

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On the front page of the Washington Post, writer Steven Pearlstein contradicts himself by writing that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being “rescued from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments,” undercutting arguments for “privatization, deregulation, and a faith in free markets.”

But the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly an indictment of the free market: Fannie and Freddie are “Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” not products of the free market or the…

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