(Laughs out loud.)

It's really the same thing, after all. My liberty to succeed is equal to your liberty to fail.
.

"Please don't let the government help me any more".

Eric, they have their hearts in the right place...in our hands and pumping for tax dollars.

Up to us to let them die, or not.

But her mortgage, if it's headed toward default, may very well be my problem. Perhaps it should not have become so, but that was then and this is now. We find ourselves on a precipice of our own making, but a precipice nonetheless. And it may well be that her bad mortgage (multiplied by hundreds of thousands and more) will bring down my bank, your bank, your employer, your IRA, etc. Perhaps this isn't the exact right moment to take up questions of moral hazard and just desserts.

her bad mortgage (multiplied by hundreds of thousands and more) will bring down my bank, your bank, your employer, your IRA

And whose fault is that?

Mine???

I never approved of the lowering of standards.

As I tried to explain in previous posts, banks are supposed to protect themselves by not making bad loans. They used to require good credit and 20% down. The former makes defaults unlikely, and the latter offers insurance that the bank has a marketable security even in the event of default.

That was all thrown out the window, thanks to the government lowering standards:

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2008/09/post_883.html

So why should ordinary taxpayers be stuck holding the bag?

Perhaps (as you say) "this isn't the exact right moment to take up questions of moral hazard and just desserts," but I wrote about it in September too.

Or wasn't that the right moment either?

Are there "right moments" on blogs?

This crisis was not exactly unforeseen; I spent most of a decade reading the Economist with their wonderfully prescient predictions of what would likely happen and why. I will agree 100% that you did well to point out the moral hazard issues. And it still remains the case that we are all now victims of and stuck with the aftermath of actions that we disapproved both then and now. "Too big to fail" is not just a catch phrase. If Citibank and BA truly go down the tubes, most of us will be sucked along in their wake. Maybe the dam operator should have used more concrete in the foundations, as many of us said all along; but now the flood waters are cresting. Shall we just send out a note to abandon the town and "sauve qui peut"?

Ok, i just have to defend the girl in the picture since it is all over the blogs and there have been some unkind remarks. That "lady" is my 18 year old, and she made the sign herself..no one told her what she should say. She remembers the crappy little condo that she spent the first 10 years of her life growing up in ( no complaints from her) it was a 50k property that was our first home while my husband went to college. She remembers the house we rented when we moved to Ca, it was nicer than our first property but we certainly could not afford to buy a home in CA. 2 years ago we bought our 2nd home, and yes it's nice and we worked hard and sacrificed for years to get to this point. That lovely girl who is not selfish in the least understands the process of saving and making tough choices for the future she wants for herself. She is the girl when there is a group assignment in class that ends up staying up all night because most of the other kids failed to do their part or were too busy or some circumstance came up and they could not fulfill their obligation....so i'd say she gets the concept. She understands that these huge expenditures by our government will be up to the producers of her generation to pay off, and she is rightly pissed off about it. So we took our kids out of school for the day and drove 3 hours so that we could all "vent" our frustrations. BTW you should see my 10 yr olds sign.....she gets it too.

Kristine,

I don't really want to try to speak for Eric, but he didn't say that your daughter was being selfish -- just that "the sanctimonious left is so fond of accusing people of being selfish," and that he quite liked your daughter's sign.

Me, too, incidentally.

You don't say if your daughter is being bothered by the "unkind" words that you're seeing on blogs or not, but it definitely sounds like you are. Hopefully, some kind ones will take some of the sting out of the unkind ones:

I'm unfortunately a bit too far from any of these protest so far to join any of them. I greatly appreciate every one of you who are there, just because you're doing something I can't. Thank you, and the rest of your family, for your efforts.

My comment was really for the anonymous poster and for the few blog posters who called her selfish,which really were not that many. I didn't mean to come off as super sensitive! I'm just a momma bear i suppose. I actually had to switch signs with her because her other sign was attracting more attention and i got cornered by MANY people over it and she doesn't have conservative claws yet (she's learning though).
As for the mortgage mess, i believe i read that there seem to be 4 states with really the biggest foreclosure worries, and when i read that i certainly wasn't suprised and it made sense...Cali, arizona, florida, geesh i forgot the other, but those are areas where the prices were seriously overinflated. I lived in the east bay (dublin) for a few years so it's not like i was even looking at "prime" areas as in the bay proper or in La yet the landlords told us they paid 600k for the house we were living in....and it wasn't even a McMansion (or a real desirable area).
Most of my family lives in Mo, and my sister's house is about 250k and i have to say it's nicer than the 350k home we bought in central va. Those overinflated prices were not sustainable and the market had to come down at some point to a more realistic level, even if we have to suffer it needs to right itself.

Only because the sanctimonious left is so fond of accusing people of being selfish, I thought I'd change it a little, to make it, you know, more altruistic.

And that moral concession, in a nutshell, is *why* we are galloping towards tyranny.

That process will not and cannot be halted until enough people have the moral fortitude to look at the outstretched hand of need, and say "No -- my freedom to choose is MORALLY antecedent to your need."

Altruism is NOT about benevolence or generosity -- it is about the *unchosen obligation*, or duty thereof. There are no unchosen obligations -- no moral duties -- under liberty.

That is the only moral context within which a proper, non-altrustic generosity can find expression -- charity done in *recognition* of every individual's right to help or not.

As Billy Beck recently put it:

When people are forced to live each others' follies, what happens is that they just don't care. I've said it before: "I don't care. This government has priced me right out of that market."

Pay close attention: what you're seeing is a stake driven right through the heart of one of the most beautiful attributes of the American character: a people who were always among the kindest and most generous on earth, until their government began teaching them that "we're all in this together," and enforcing it.

Do you think this culture is getting "coarse", now?

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Kristine: your daughter owes nobody an apology. I hope she understand that those who think she does, are the morally bankrupt ones.

I didn't think I was really making much of a moral concession so much I was making a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke!

However, if my offhanded remark is "why we are galloping towards tyranny" then I really should apologize.

So, to the entire country, let me say I'm sorry for all the tyranny! I really didn't mean any harm!