Average Joe

The last lick of justice is swept from the lawmaking slate as congress prepares to reward private companies for their lascivious vies for piles of ill-gotten dollars. Temptation to turn a profit coaxes the Fed to take over, setting a profligate precedent for future intervention.

A congressional vote wrought the denial of President Bush’s mortgage “bail out” Monday. But congress prepares to vote a second time to approve hundreds of billions in federal spending designed to purchase waves of mortgage securities from financial institutions. The bill bets on a housing market recovery. But within a year, “first mortgage” defaults are expected to approach 3 million according to a Wall Street Journal compilation, which would render those securities invaluable.

This, while Joe awaits his executive ordered fate.

“What happens when the government becomes a business?”

Good question, Joe.

Promises of “oversight” are purged from the lips of treasury secretary Paulson’s supporters, yet the loosely defined term could prove more ominous than reassuring.

Giving congress power to explicitly dictate the behavior of major financial institutions strengthens the Federal Reserve’s unyielding monopoly and empowers them to enforce strict regulation.

“Oversight,” as a blanket phrase, could do for the treasury department what “Threat to national security” did for the Department of Defense. “Oversight” puts the Fed in a place to standardize household finances in likeness to public education’s “No Child Left Behind Act.”

Joe’s financial freedom gets tossed into the same can as his right to privacy and due process, while his children are forced through bubble sheet pigeon holes and processed learning outcomes Idaho’s Representative Bill Sali believes this type of legislation could open the door for further intervention.

“[It would] put the federal government in the realm of private enterprise. It’s no longer a free market,” said Wayne Hoffman, spokesman for representative Sali.

Yet the federal government grows, printing its own money, eating whatever industry loses a step in the market and spreading its own boundaries. It’s as if the constitution were a mere blank page.

Thomas Jefferson said, “Is confidence or discretion, or is strict limit, the pRinciple of our constitution?” He said this when liberty, not luxury, was the primary providence of government, when morality, not money, was it’s foundational characteristic.

The action of these bailouts seeks to sustain the promiscuous lifestyles that have become stereotypical to American culture.

“Wait, what?”

Even you, Joe.

Frivolity does not escape even the tiniest

of consumers.

We demand instant gratification,from music and fast food all the way to vehicles and homes, and we put it all on credit. These falling financial institutions wanted money and they, along with the Federal Reserve who kept interest rates artificially low, found a way to create it out of thin air and then write off all obligation by selling it on the open market.

The failure of these immoral institutions is the inevitability that is promised by true free enterprise and the results of such failures could mean dramatic changes, not only in our bank accounts, but in our lifestyles.

Morality comforts not the man who desires to be fed, but cradles he who chooses for himself that which is right over that which feels warm. The choice is ours to remain free and brave the cold, or sign over our freedom for a blanket.

JACOB MORRIS
Special to the Arbiter

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