"Pravda" doesn't equal "Truth"

Submitted another pointlessly long LTE to the pointless denizens of the Times, but sometimes activism requires catharsis simply to go on.

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Re: White House Philosophy Stoked Mortgage Bonfire

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/business/21admin.html?hp

Like bad marksmen or Wrong-way Corrigan, the famous aviator who accidentally flew from New York to Ireland instead of California, the Leftists at the Times unerringly end up, once again, in Moscow instead of Main Street. For anyone who wants to look at the facts without Red-tinted glasses; consider

"...for much of Mr. Bush’s tenure, government statistics show, incomes for most families remained relatively stagnant while housing prices skyrocketed. That put homeownership increasingly out of reach for first-time buyers like Mr. West."

Not that you would know it from the Times' story, but the reason for the skyrocketing prices which preceded Bush was skyrocketing demand created by Democratic programs -- easy money from the Federal Reserve, easy rates, easy sub-prime payments, easy borrowing qualifications for unqualified borrowers, easy confidence the government would never let anyone fail, and full assurance the government would help banks fail if they didn't lend to the people government wanted them to lend to.

While there's no question political pandering and outright stupidity by the fools in the Bush Administration bears part of the responsibility for the mortgage crisis, it is also unquestionable the preponderance of the problem started with Democratic Administrations promoting housing programs, beginning with the creation of Fannie Mae during the Great Depression, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, expanding with the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter, and culminating with the apotheosis of corruption under Franklin Delano Raines, appointed under Bill Clinton.

How ironic that our next Depression may be caused by a program from the last one. But the pattern is always the same -- the "solutions" government offers are always guaranteed to make the problem return in the not-so distant future, as they are now with the "bailout" of everyone who is guilty and so much more.

But the truth is greater than absolution or blame of Democrats or Republicans, who differ little in principle or in practice today. Whether the Times will admit it or not, the mortgage crisis and meltdown was 100% a creation of *government* interference in markets, in the name of politicians promoting "social justice", buying votes, and lining their own pockets. It can't be whitewashed by blaming Wall Street, Main Street, or any street except both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The truth is: the people in Congress possess a power they should never have had: control of the economy. Corruption in the private sector is inevitable under such conditions -- because power doesn't corrupt just politicians, it corrupts *everybody*. That is the real reason for any failures of "Main Street". The only proper solution, the only solution that will prevent the problem from occurring or recurring, is to take away that power.

Alan Greenspan betrayed Ayn Rand's ideals of laissez faire capitalism long before the housing crisis, and long before he blamed those ideals in a lie before Congress. But as Rand used to say, reality is its own avenger, and the attempt to whitewash facts is one reason the Times itself has now had to mortgage their own building. Burying the truth doesn't make a dead body go away, and when a once reputable newspaper becomes more enamored of its own political agenda than informing, it has to become decaying carrion in a society where only a "news" organ such as the old Soviet "Pravda" (Russian word for "truth") can succeed.