United Liberty

Most of us have seen the passionate speech given by George Baily in It’s a Wonderful Life to the evil bank-owner, Mr. Potter, begging for leniency towards Potter’s delinquent homeowners and espousing why owning a home makes the residents of Bedford Falls better citizens and more productive members of society.

Mr. Potter is simply interested in making sure his payments are received on time and that foreclosures are issued to those who fall behind.  He believes, and rightly so, that if a man has overextended himself and cannot pay his bills, the mortgage owner has the right to claim the house and boot the residents out.

George Baily, however, is more interested in promoting the “American Dream”- home ownership- and has built his life and Savings and Loan business around helping families buy homes… even if they’re not quite ready to take on that financial responsibility.

Now, fortunately, in Hollywood, it’s easy to make this work by simply writing it into the script, but real life is another story- one that’s ending in shattered dreams and broken hearts.  More and more families are finding themselves kicked out of their homes, sometimes leaving more than just memories behind.

But who’s to blame?  Several parties, actually, including the homeowners themselves. It’s easy to point to predatory lenders who sucked in these people in the first place, but no one placed a gun to the homeowners head and forced them to live beyond their means.  The government has also played it’s role by poor regulation of the financial industry and creating articially low interest rates via the Fed, leading to the housing bubble and higher than normal home prices.

The solution?  Well, it certainly wasn’t the “billionaire bailout” recently passed by our nanny-state Congressmen.  This bailout is a bandaid placed over a severed limb.  The government can now placate the panicing American people by saying that they did something, even if that something does nothing positive and will end up doing a great deal more damage in the long run by delaying the needed market adjustments that would eventually set things to rights.

The real solution would have been for the government to keep their dirty hands off and to instead have focused on deregulating the market, lowering taxes, cutting government spending and balancing the budget.  The recently passed legislation, instead, does just the opposite.

This video shows some of the devastation manifesting itself in the wake of this government-influenced disaster.