WHY SOCIAL JUSTICE LOVES ECONOMIC CRISIS
That this is not mathematically possible doesn’t mean it won’t be politically advantageous. After all, the federal government has a printing press for money and near-endless taxation powers to move assets from one group to another. Politicians don’t have to make the numbers work, they just need sound like they are favoring the little guy over the cigar-chomping, monocle-wearing capitalists who caused all the problems. This class warrior rabble rousing will be popular because people always want to believe someone else is to blame. We’ve recently seen the progressive Left in action on this. Back in 2008, we were told the entire financial system was on the brink of annihilation. Bernanke, Paulson, and the whole government-banker industrial complex told the American people we were at the economic equivalent of DEFCON 2. Who got us there? According to the Left, it was the fault of Wall Street, and only Wall Street. The rewriting and whitewashing involved has been astonishing. The average American believes that financial institutions simply conjured up all those mortgage schemes out of thin air, and then in an act of maniacal greed, almost destroyed the global economy. Sure, Wall Street was greedy and reckless. But the government also played a huge role in the 2008 crisis. For decades leading up the mortgage meltdown, the feds had been erasing lending standards. Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, and all the way up through the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, access to credit was no longer a financial issue, but a civil rights
issue. Banks were told to lend to borrowers from underserved communities, or risk federal lawsuits and media shaming for racism. None of that narrative made it into The Big Short , arguably the most culturally authoritative account of the last financial crisis. Nor were any of the main characters in that film found wondering aloud about the role that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac played in the financial engineering catastrophe. The Great Recession of 2008 thus became solely the fault of rich bankers... while the federal government that gave them the oil- soaked rags and lighter escaped blame entirely. Here we are a decade later, and the government is carrying more debt than ever before. So are American households. There are rumblings from mainstream Democrat politicians about forgiving $1.3 trillion in student loans. Free college, free healthcare, and even free housing are rallying cries among the millennial generation that knows the government can’t pay its debts. If Uncle Sam can walk away from its obligations, why can’t they? Revolutions, like bankruptcies, happen gradually... then suddenly. There is a surge in socialist sentiment in America right now. We should stop assuming that all sides of the political spectrum want to avoid a debt crisis. For the growing contingent of Americans who believe that social justice is the single most important goal of society, there is no better way to put all matters into the hands of the state than to bring about the collapse of the free market.
Access to credit was no longer a financial issue, but a civil rights issue.
60 | November 2017
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