Arianna Huffington clearly cannot see her own hand in front of her face.
Arianna Huffington at Real Clear Politics
Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, famously declared that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
Twenty-seven years later, in the midst of the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression, and seven-plus years into the reign of Bush
and Cheney, Reagan's anti-government battle cry should be on trial.
But, stunningly, it is not.
There is a very simple reason for that Arianna, that's because government is the problem. Government in the form of attempts at engineering social conditions through the Community Reinvestment Act. Government forcing lenders, with the threat of legal action, to make loans to people that no sane business would make loans to. Government in the form of willful blindness to the fiscal reality of a Fanny Mae that was out of control for years.
And when I say "government" I mean Democrats.
Huffington, in her far reaching advocacy of what amounts to socialism, goes on to extol the virtues of a government that grows, presumably without limit, and takes care of all of our problems the way God intended. She accuses Republicans of being two faced, wanting government out of the way and wanting it to bail them out of this emergency. She says Republicans want no regulations—until they need to be rescued from themselves. But the only way she can reconcile this strange twist of logic is to completely (willfully?) ignore the facts. We are not dealing with a failure of the market so much as we are dealing with a failure of government to stay out of the way in the first place. She forgets (willfully?) that it was Democrats who fought against regulation of Fanny Mae. More than once. It was Democrats who believed—and continue to believe, if Huffington is any measure—that you can change the way the world works simply by passing a law that says it has changed. And, if their good-intentioned law fails to produce the desired Utopian result, it must have been underfunded. Throw more money at it!
Huffington also forgets (willfully?) that a majority of Republicans voted against the bailout, which completely invalidates her whole premise. Conservatives are understandably reluctant to bail out a system which they have been trying to reign in for years but, to paraphrase Mr. Reagan, government needs to be part of the solution because government was the cause of the problem.
And when I say government...
Update: Hello Hot Air readers! Reading Ed Morrissey proves
you have good judgment. I'm just starting to blog again after a two
year hiatus. I hope you'll look around and return to see how I'm doing.
