Dartblog

The National Review had the following commentary about what seems to amount to little more than a corporate welfare plan before Congress:

Treasury secretary Hank Paulson announced a plan to save troubled mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by placing them in a government conservatorship and injecting them with billions of taxpayer dollars. This is a necessary intervention, but it does not go far enough. Paulson’s actions fail to resolve the fundamental problem that got us into this mess. As long as Fannie and Freddie exist as hybrid public/private enterprises, investors in the companies will reap the rewards when they succeed and taxpayers will cover the costs when they fail. This structure, a classic moral hazard, encourages heedless growth and excessive risk-taking, and is the reason Fannie and Freddie hover on the brink of insolvency now. The only foundation for real reform is one that puts these bloated behemoths on the road to full privatization and frees the mortgage market of their domination.

This plan does go, quite nicely, with a very fitting slogan for the Obama campaign proposed by an asute reader:

Obama ‘08: “Socializing risk, privatizing profits.”