Hillary Clinton touring a Las Vegas neighborhood yesterday:

Clinton said unscrupulous lending leads to bad mortgages, which lead to foreclosures, which lead to people with nowhere to go and vacant neighborhoods that can go rapidly downhill.

First of all, what’s wrong with this picture?

We have the evil lender.

We have the heartless bank.

We have “bad mortgages.”

Which lead to heartless capitalists foreclosing on the poor, unsuspecting homeowners.

There’s something missing in all of that and I will bet you only a conservative could find it.

(Answer below the fold)

HOW ABOUT THE IDIOT CONSUMER WHO TOOK A “TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE” LOAN IN THE FIRST PLACE!

“Unscrupulous” lending? I hardly think any loan officer or mortgage salesman has to pull any kind of trickery on someone looking to buy a home in the “sub prime” market. The very definition of sub prime customers are people who are high risk in the first place. These are people who “want” a home. I am very happy for them. I want a 750 foot yacht but that doesn’t mean I can afford one or that any bank or lending institution in their right mind would loan me the money to buy one.

The basis of the sub-prime crisis is stupidity and irresponsibility – both on the part of the lender and the customer. The lenders believed the housing boom would go on forever, that the price of homes would continue to rise in a fluid market thus giving their sub prime customers who had no business getting a loan in the first place the opportunity to sell their home and move in 4 or 5 years, avoiding the ballooning payments and interest rates.

But something happened on the way to paradise – the inexorable law of supply and demand took over and builders – who were building homes as fast they could throw them up – suddenly looked up and realized they had a slew of empty houses with no customers filling them. The rapid rise in home prices not only enticed builders to build more but the existing home market quickly became saturated with all of these sub prime customers trying to unload their houses before midnight struck and their mortgages turned into a pumpkin.

Conservatives believe in personal responsibility – and that not only includes the homeowners who erred in taking the loans but in the financial institutions that made the loans in the first place. Bailing out businesses that make bad decisions is contrary to the ideals of a free market and only encourages continued bad decision making.

The market should not have a “safety net” where if your company is big enough or has enough political pull, the government will step in and save you from your folly. That way, you make government a partner in the business. That might be alright for Communist China but it shouldn’t be done here.

Taxpayers should not be paying for other people’s mistakes at the personal or corporate level. Most taxpayers I know – myself included – have their own problems and don’t need to be burdened with the consequences of stupidity, greed, and bad judgement exhibited by other individuals or businesses.

And if this ends up hurting the economy – which it will – then perhaps a valuable lesson will have been learned and probity, caution, and responsible lending practices will be rewarded instead of devalued by bailing out those companies who don’t deserve it.

And the people whose homes are foreclosed? Yes it’s sad when someone loses their home. To say that I don’t feel sympathy for families who have made terrible decisions and are forced out of their house would be wrong. And for those who have no where else to go, the government should do its job and lay out a safety net for them.

But most people who are being foreclosed on have jobs and are perfectly able to find another place to live. They probably won’t own the house or apartment but they won’t starve nor will they be thrown out on the street. Do these people really need the government’s help? Democrats think so. Democrats want to reward the irresponsible regardless of their financial situation. Democrats want to give out taxpayer money so that even those who are capable of taking care of themselves will have their mistakes forgiven – thanks to our generosity.

It is not social Darwinism to demand individual responsibility from citizens. Without it, we become nothing more than slaves to the government, dependent on Big Brother to think for us, to make decisions for us – decisions we used to make ourselves. And every time we surrender that decision making and every time we allow the government to step in – even it it is to save us from being hoisted on our own petard – we lose a little freedom. This is the trade off we make – a fact the liberals desperately try to hide from people lest they rebel against their slavemasters and take back their own lives.

But liberals needn’t worry too much. It appears from where I’m sitting that the American people are completely willing to sell their birthright of liberty for the ease and comfort of government serfdom. The liberals have trained us monkeys very well. Vote for them and out pops a banana treat. No need to take responsibility for your own life. Not when there are so many in government eager to run it for you.

UPDATE

Not unexpectedly, Malkin reports that Obama jumps on the bailout bandwagon with both feet:

“We’re going to put money in the pockets of hardworking Americans who deserve it. That’s what I’m fighting for,” Obama told hotel and restaurant workers packed into the steamy union hall of the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226. The Illinois senator said he identified with their economic hardships.

O Gawd! Another Democrat who feels our pain. If I were you, I’d keep a tight grip on my wallet when the Dems come to town.

Michelle asks the same questions I do:

How about identifying with responsible homeowners and responsible taxpayers who’ll be paying for all this election-year largesse–much of it not to Americans “who deserve it,” but to people who shouldn’t have been taking out home loans they couldn’t pay for and mortgage companies that shouldn’t have taken them on as customers?

How about them?

The Republicans are no better:

“There’s clearly an additional need to consider other measures,” Mr. McCain said Wednesday. “I will know within a very short period of time whether these policies are succeeding or not,” he said of Mr. Paulson’s plan to persuade lenders voluntarily to modify some troubled mortgages. Mr. Romney has called for the creation of a business cooperative that would pool the bad loans in one entity that would then be able to handle individual solutions with homeowners. Romney’s aides also say he favors increased funding for a government chartered housing-services agency called NeighborWorks America.

Of course, the outgrowth of all of this will be more regulation, more red tape. If the government would only step back and let the market do its job, that wouldn’t be necessary. Those companies engaged in this tomfoolery would suffer the ultimate judgement of the free market while those who followed established, safe, and responsible lending practices would be rewarded appropriately by seeing their bottom line unaffected.

Instead, the burden will now also fall on those responsible companies who are suffering a liquidity crisis along with the rest of the financial industry. And the sad fact is, the big security companies who used these mortgages in high risk mortgage funds knew that the piper would have to be paid eventually but probably didn’t care because they figured the government would bail them out if worse came to worse.

It was Joseph Kennedy who was one of the first of the mega rich to see what the New Deal meant to capitalism – from that point on, government would have a huge say in the market and that those who controlled government would have more power than any of the robber baron capitalists who ever ran roughshod over Wall Street. That’s why he pushed his sons toward a political career, thinking that government interference in the market would only grow over time.

Kennedy, one of the shrewdest operators ever to prowl Wall Street, was right. He foresaw a time when government would see itself as the final arbiter in the market rather than market forces themselves. And with Democrats in the lead, that vision continues to skew the market in ways that we will rue before too long.