Josh the Aspie’s Blog

Many people who want to punish free speech hold up the example of how “You can’t shout Fire in a Crowded Theater,” and according to some of my friends, now many are trying to use this example to impinge upon other rights as well. Well even according to Messrs Justice Douglas, and Justice Black, the speech in which one calls fire, and the resultant acts which descend from one’s speech are inextricably linked, and it is the resultant actions for which the speaker is responsible that he is tried. Yet if there is no resulting action worthy of being tried — perhaps because there was an actual fire, or perhaps because everyone ignores you — there is nothing on which to try the person calling out “Fire!”

Liberty is a two edged sword. One edge is called freedom, the other is called responsibility. For in order to gain and preserve freedom, someone in our society must shoulder the burden of defending our way of life. Those people are the armed forces. Further, anyone who exercises their freedoms needs to own up to the consequences of their action… because if we expect other people to bail us out of our mistakes not only are we demeaning ourselves, but we are trying to remove the freedoms of others.

There seems to be a moral decay in our society, in which fewer and fewer people are willing to take responsibility for their actions. Take the following example.

The Federal Government decides that we are in a slump, and in order to try to fix it, they cut the federal interest rates upon which all short term loans between banks are based. These rate cuts in turn cause mortgage rates to drop. Greedy banks decide to offer adjustable rate mortgages which they know their customers cannot afford, and couple them with “no interest for x months” loans, combined with a Balloon payment, and lie to their borrowers about what this means for them. Rather than reading the terms and conditions and making sure they understand them, the borrower simply accepts the explanation and signs.

Now x months down the road the borrower has to pay a lump sum equal to the difference between what the borrower has paid, and what the borrower would have paid had they been charged interest the entire time. If they cannot afford the payment, the bank is within it’s right to foreclose on the house. This is further exacerbated by adjustable rate loans making it harder to pay just the normal payments on time. And bing, the bank has a new house they can sell, and all of the money that the borrower could not pay. They plan to then re-sell the house, and make more money than if they had not ruined someone’s life.

Only this happens to so many people that the housing market crashes, and takes some other industries. People find out that their houses are worth less than the money they still have to pay on their loans, and just walk away from the debt, leaving banks (who may have been honest ones) holding the bag. The economy takes further hits, and that market crashes, causing the economy as a whole to slow down. That’s right, it does not enter a recession, it simply has slower growth than people have been used to for a while.

Now the media, who makes money off of selling people bad news — if you can call it that, rather than calling it a bald faced lie — decides to hype how we’re in a recession, and the sky is falling! Only we’re not. Because of this the public, rather than looking into it any further accept this story. If they are lucky they catch a report by a reporter or editorialist that gets some of his ratings by bashing on the rest of the media, and dig a little deeper. Now it may be that a recession is on it’s way, but it’s not here yet, and the media saying we’re already in one only encourages recession levels of spending, which pushes us further in that direction.

Now due to the pressure from the public, the Federal Government decides that it must do something to fix the problem. So what does it do? It does the exact same thing that got us into the mess we are in now, and cuts the federal prime interest rate. Only it has no positive effect due to how swingy and needy the markets are, and we will likely have the same headache later on.

And in the mean time both home owners and the banks are demanding that the government bail them out, and most of the people running for office are pushing expensive stimulus packages. All of this would puts in further debt which means that eventually when we get our heads on strait and try to fix the national debt every American is simply going to have to pay more money to get it done.

So who’s fault is this whole mess? Is it the fault of the Federal Government? Should we shake our fingers at lazy home buyers? Is it all on the head of dishonest banks? Different people have different answers, but there always seems to be something in common. They blame Jeffie’s little friend: “Not Me!”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 12:54 am and is filed under Current Events, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.