Topic: Horowitz
We've previously noted David Horowitz's attempt to talk some sense into conservatives by pointing out the unassailable fact that the Community Reinvestment Act did not cause the current financial crisis. So why did Horowitz's FrontPageMag publish writers who claimed it was?
To be sure, many economists dispute that deregulation is the principal cause of the current crisis. They cite the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which stipulated that banks had an “affirmative obligation” to make loans to low-income borrowers of dubious creditworthiness; the role of government-sponsored enterprises like Freddie Mac and Fanny May [sic]; and the activist interventions of the Federal Reserve in financial markets as the driving forces of the financial turmoil.
-- Jacob Laksin, Oct. 17
It was the left - the "liberals" or "progressives" - who led the charge to force lending institutions to lend to people whose credit history made them eligible only for "subprime" loans that were risky for both borrowers and lenders.
It started way back in the Carter administration, with the Community Reinvestment Act, and gained momentum over the years with legal threats from Attorney General Janet Reno and thuggery from ACORN, all to force lenders to lend where third parties wanted them to lend. Now we have a bad stomach ache - and now the left wants to start amputating the market.
-- Thomas Sowell, Nov. 7
Q: Are the subprime credit crisis and the stock market’s swoon and the dollar’s drop in value symptoms of a deeper, larger, broader problem?
A: Well, no, they are simply the problems that they are. The government has brought on the housing problem, partly by these very low interest rates, which encouraged many people to go way out on a limb. They’ve brought it on by highly restrictive building policies, which have caused housing prices to skyrocket artificially. And they’ve brought it on by the Community Reinvestment Act, which presumes that politicians are better able to tell investors where to put their money than the investors themselves are. When you put all that together, you get something like what you have.
-- Interview of Thomas Sowell by Bill Steigerwald, Feb. 4
Meanwhile, Horowitz is still strugging mightily to impose reason on those birth-certificate-obsessed right-wingers:
If this were to come to pass, the principles could not be enforced. In the second place, conservatives need to recognize and accept that they lost the election and it is important for Americans to accept their new president. He may do things, AS PRESIDENT, that will cause them to oppose him, and that is fine. But first they need to accept him as President, because that is the way our constitutional system works. And it is the only way it works.
And judging by the comments, it's going about as well as his previous attempts.
