Thomas Sowell's Wisdom # 1 of 2

Thomas Sowell’s Wisdom # 1 of 2
cinops be gone Monday, October 13, 2008 A.M.
This article is a gem by black American Thomas Sowell an economist.
It is In the Orange County Register, Tues. Oct. 7, 2008. Opinion Section p. 9

Abraham Lincoln said, you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”

Unfortunately, the future of this country as well as the fate of the Western world depends on how many people can be fooled on Election Day 4 weeks from today.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of people are being fooled a whole lot of time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain in opinion polls – which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama’s rhetoric and media spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact No. 1: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, who for years including the present year – denied that Fannie May and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Sen. Dodd, Rep. Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime loans, which are at the heart of today’s financial crisis.

Also, Greenspan warned them 4 years ago. So did the Chairman of the White House council of economic advisers. So did George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That is was the Bush administration “right wing ideology of deregulation” that set the state for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as “Community Reinvestment Act” and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn’t.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?
George H. Kubeck