The Best of Times

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Adam

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Housing Crisis?

OK…
So I usually don’t like people that simply rant and yell and scream on YouTube or on their blogs but I saw this and I think it reflects the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of Americans today regarding the financial recession and the supposed “help” that President Obama has decided to give.

I feel like Rick has some valid points. I think that these points are valid for perhaps a deeper reason that he realizes. I agree with Rick that the government is rewarding irresponsibility and bad behavior in many of its moves lately. I do not think that it is right for us to be bailing out anyone who has been hurt by the economy because of their own bad decisions. My basis for this decision is as follows. The role of government, in its very basic form, is to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens. In doing this, it is only authorized to exercise power that the people themselves already possess individually. Similarly, it should only obligated to do things that individual citizens also are obligated to do. If my neighbor has purchased a house which he knows he can not reasonably pay for and then has added to that debt by living further beyond his means, I do not have the responsibility to help him out of that predicament. I may, if I wish, but I do not have a social obligation to help him. Likewise, he has no right to expect that myself and his other neighbors should bail him out from his bad decisions. This is the essence of responsibility and capitalism. When we make bad or unwise decisions, we are responsible to deal with and respond to the consequences of those actions. We have no right to go weeping and wailing to the government, and thereby to our fellow citizens, to save us from the consequences of our unwise decisions.

So there you have it folks. I fear that this kind of action on the part of the government is only the first step on a slippery slope that will lead our country into the kind of social decay that we have tried for decades to avoid. I’m afraid that this kind of action is a harbinger of an accelerating decay into socialism, the very evil that the last great wars of our time have fought to push back.

Comments

One response to “Housing Crisis?”

  1. Karen Avatar
    Karen

    Adam,
    I thought you might find these words from Theodore Roosevelt to the French in 1910 interesting. He said:
    “There should, so far as possible, be equal of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artists, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.

    “To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and cannot be true. . . . It is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and those who do it.”

    I find it frustrating to have spent my entire life working and saving to be debt free, sacrificing vacations, eating out, movies, etc. (the stuff most people fill their lives with), and then have to bail out those who have not made similar sacrifices and who were not wise enough to realize they could not afford what they were buying with credit, or who were inefficient or worse in their business and companies. I do believe there are those who are suffering without any fault of their own. These we should try to help-as individuals–not as a government. But we should not send the message to me and others like me that our way of life is laughable, that an easier way is to wait for the government to save us.

    Reply

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