Liberal Self-Dealing And Financial Crises

January 5, 2011 05:14


The most vulnerable are punished, the party elites become cynically corrupt, and a bewildered citizenry is led off a financial cliff.

IBD Editorials

EXCERPTS:

As Americans struggle to make sense of a devastating succession of financial crises — from teetering banks to a collapsed stock market to bankrupt car companies to underfunded public employee pensions and now exploding state deficits — we can see in each the malignant expression of a decades-old failing within the Democrat Party.

Academics and nonprofits with a vested interest in government intervention continued to measure social justice in terms of taxpayer-funded welfare services.

At the same time, blue state legislatures established scores of commissions and advisory groups that advocated only those policies that benefitted public employee unions.

Most depressingly of all, many civil rights leaders made a Faustian bargain with public worker unions, tacitly agreeing to endorse state-run approaches to integration in exchange for guaranteed labor and government support.

It would be shameful enough if the self-dealing of liberal elites were confined to exploiting the groups they pretended to serve. But the theory and practice of state paternalism now threatens the entire economy.

No investment house would have collapsed, no TARP would have been required, the real estate and stock markets would not have collapsed, had not congressional Democrats forced banks to break with common sense and make loans to unqualified borrowers in the name of “social justice.”

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