Why your property is never safe from do-gooders, the mortgage meltdown, The View

A regular feature of The American Culture, highlighting items revealing trends in American society and culture, compiled by TAC correspondent Mike Gray.

Liberty and Property

Ludwig von Mises, the foremost exponent of the Austrian school of economics, had some pertinent things to say about two out of the three rights our Founding Fathers considered most worth mentioning as the common heritage of mankind. He gave a lecture at Princeton University in 1958 that probably scandalized or perhaps even outraged any Keynesians in the audience with pronouncements such as the following:

1. The pre-capitalistic system of product was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. . . .

2. What vitiates entirely the socialists’ economic critique of capitalism is their failure to grasp the sovereignty of the consumers in the market economy. . . .

3. Romantic philosophy labored under the illusion that in the early ages of history the individual was free and that the course of historical evolution deprived him of his primordial liberty. . . .

4. The distinctive principle of Western social philosophy is individualism. It aims at the creation of a sphere in which the individual is free to think, to choose, and to act without being restrained by the interference of the social apparatus of coercion and oppression, the State. . . .

5. The shortcoming of nineteenth-century historians and politicians was that they failed to realize that the workers were the main consumers of the products of industry. In their view, the wage earner was a man toiling for the sole benefit of a parasitic leisure class. They labored under the delusion that the factories had impaired the lot of the manual workers. . . .

6. The admirers of the Soviet system tell us again and again that freedom is not the supreme good. It is "not worth having," if it implies poverty. To sacrifice it in order to attain wealth for the masses, is in their eyes fully justified. But for a few unruly individualists who cannot adjust themselves to the ways of regular fellows, all people in Russia are perfectly happy. We may leave it undecided whether this happiness was also shared by the millions of Ukrainian peasants who died from starvation, by the inmates of the forced labor camps, and by the Marxian leaders who were purged.

Sometimes it seems that "the admirers of the Soviet system" haven’t really gone away but have managed to ingratiate (some would say infiltrate) themselves into the commentariat and the halls of power in America. Or does item 6 above sound unfamiliar to you?

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Another Angle on the Mortgage Meltdown

In case you’re entertaining the beguiling notion that attempts of special interest groups to prod Congress into granting amnesty to the 12 to 20 million (some would double those figures) illegal aliens are history never to be repeated, you need to think again. Just wait until after the elections.

While the Democrat Party will always enjoy the support of the amnesty crowd, the Republicans are constantly trying to play catch-up with their opposition, even going so far as to (one assumes involuntarily) help precipitate a major economic crisis in an attempt to garner voter allegiance, as Steve Sailer notes:

There’s one man, however, who has so far escaped any blame. Few have realized something that turns out to have been staring us in the face all along: that the mortgage mess was, in sizable measure, an outgrowth of the primary political goal of the Bush Administration.

That man’s name is Karl Rove.

And the primary political goal of President George W. Bush’s political strategist: to bring Hispanics into the Republican Party. 

Citing Bush’s speech at an October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership, Sailer notes, Bush called for a forced increase of homeownership among African-Americans and Hispanics, specifically singling out those two groups:

The five and a half million marginal minority homeowners that Bush bunglingly called for is a big number. At a mortgage of, say, $127,000 each, that would add up to, let me check my calculator, oh…

$700 billion—the size of the current bailout. Well, whaddaya know. . . . 

Sailer says this "minority mortgage meltdown" may trigger a "diversity recession."

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Foot-in-Head* Better Than Foot-in-Mouth

A popular TV talk show is angling for more viewers with yet another cast change. We certainly hope this item is true. Many probably agree that just about anything would be better than the previous co-hostess.

*The literal meaning of "cephalopod."