How do we keep interchanging greed with profit motive. Our economy is essentially steeped in this idea, but we've let our idiotic media point to profitability as a bad thing.
Someone villifying a company for legitimately making profits or an individual for trying to make a return should be summarily fired, ignored and ostracized.
That wasn't the question/issue. The query was who is to blame for the housing bubble and its subsequent burst. I said some of the blame is on those who trafficked in the morgtage instruments, both at the level of promoting each instrument and then also in the secondary market in re-packaging them. I specifically said its not immoral for people to want to get in on the action. I don't blame them.
But I do criticize them. And my point was that, objectively speaking, a lot of people made a lot of money not in the housing market but in the market to sell the securities end of it and, while not immoral, it without question contributed to the drive to keep issuing them and selling them, etc.
Now, we can debate the merit of whether the government or cooler temperaments should have done something to slow it down. And I do understand the argument that they should not because its the market at work and if it crashes then those at the bottom of the pyramid just weren't the smart ones.
But it does seem to me that if we are going to bail out that industry -- in some form or another -- then we are de facto acknowledging both the right and responsibility of the government (and calmer private people within the industry) to meddle and slow down the train before it goes off the tracks.
I mean, if we are going to clean up the mess on the back end, can't a case be made for conservative economic policy that short-circuiting it on the front end would be better? Or at least somewhere in the middle? Seems to me it would have been a lot more efficient had that been done.
