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Freddie and Fannie

Following its knee-jerk, free-market, Milton Friedman obsessed ideology, the Bush Administration has seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Joke. A bad one, really. If anything, this is just the latest evidence that it doesn’t matter who’s President. Is there anything this administration has done lately that reflects a free market philosophy? Yet because the administration sometimes uses the rhetoric of economic freedom, it allows people to paint the administrations policies as market-oriented.

Another thought:

One of the most depressing things about the current situation is that people will try and find different ways to "fix" the mortgage market when it was the very attempt to "fix" it that brought us to where we are today. The government should get out of the mortgage market. Let individual institutions arise that intermediate between home owners and sellers. Let those that do it well thrive. Let those that do it badly bear the costs and disappear.

It reminds me of social security. We don’t have a retirement crisis. We have a social security crisis. We have a problem created by a set of government institutions.

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