I remember reading a piece on this a while back, I think even before Neal posted it, about the large number of government backed subprime mortgages that the FHA was dolling out. I remember because I started screaming to my girlfriend about how the federal government is now doing the exact same thing that started this mess, while at the same time condemning the private sector companies that made subprime loans. In addition now the government is trying to give themselves the power to break up financial institutions as they see fit! This is absurd, I can't believe completely ignorant the population is. And then we have Congress...wtf do these people think is going to happen to this country? Oh I guess they don't care as long as they have their unlimited checkbook and can expense everything to the taxpayer. Ridiculous. How is any of this Constitutional? Government backed home mortgages? Mandated health care? Preemptively breaking up financial institutions? And of course there is so much more. I am graduating college this year and going to grad school next year and will hopefully be able to get out of this country. It is funny how every day we get more and more communist and China gets more and more capitalist....

We can thank Barney frank and Hillary Clinton for the latest FHA debacle, just as we can thank Barney and Bill for the Fannie / Freddie mess.

GW working in Iraq had nothing to do with the mortgage melt down sponsored by Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Maxine Waters. GW and John McCain tried to shut down Freddie and Fannie but your democrat friends blocked it, saying that Freddie and Fannie were just fine.
Throwing rocks makes you look very stupid.

I'm not sure who is learning from whom. We say the FHA is going broke for making loans to people who can't afford to pay them. Our federal goverment is taking out loans from a communist country that we can't afford to pay back.

The more I read about the left's campaign to have all people, no matter what their ability to pay, in their own homes, the more I believe that the Cloward-Piven Strategy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward%E2%80%93Piven_strategy is being implemented by Obama and company.

No one who successfully completed 5th grade arithmetic can be so blind as to not know that loaning hundreds of thousands of dollars to people hovering just above the poverty level is a high-risk proposition.

It's now looking to me that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA and other similar GSEs have become the instruments of implementing Cloward-Piven. We need to get government entirely out of the real estate business. We need to shut ACORN, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, et al, and let the lawyers ensure that people are not discriminated against in the courts, which is what I suspect the Founding Fathers envisioned.

"The case against government guaranteed loans and mortgages to private businesses and persons is almost as strong as, though less obvious than, the case against direct government loans and mortgages. The advocates of the gov guaranteed mortgages also forget that what is being lent is ultimately real capital, which is limited in supply, and that they are helping identified B (customer) at the expense of some unidentified A. Government guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitability mean more bad loads than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and defray the losses. They encourage people to "buy" house they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared to other things. They temporarily overestimate building, raise the cost of building for everyone (including the buyers of the homes with guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly over expansion. In brief, in the long run they do not increase the overall national production but encourage mal-investment."

Here's my other favorite.

"The most frequent fallacy by far today, the fallacy that emerges again and again in nearly every conversation that touches on economic affairs, the error of a thousand political speeches, the central sophism of the "new" economics, is to concentrate on the short run effects of policies on special groups and to ignore or belittle the long-run effects on the community as a whole."

So where do these great quotes come from? What is this great book? Who was the author? Rush? Beck? Ted Danson?

Nope. It was published in 1946. It's called Economics in One Lesson by Hentry Hazlitt. I found it used for $3 online. Do yourself and America a favor and read this book.