This and other remarkably sunny, Pollyanna observations of no consequence for you in the latest offering (or should I say “offal”?) from Rochester’s own Steven Landsburg in Slate Magazine online.  His theory?  Don’t worry about all those foreclosed upon homes, because someone else will move in.  Don’t worry, all you suckers that got played by the banks of America: you’re helping to write the great triumphant story of some douche you’ve never heard of, and that should be it’s own reward.

Better yet, rather than trying to fix problems while our economy falls down around our ears, let’s all take a moment to realize how terribly trivial it all really is:

The case for foreclosures. - By Steven E. Landsburg - Slate Magazine

Losing your house is painful. Never having anything to lose is even more painful. How do the feds justify spending money—and, rest assured, any program to stop foreclosures will cost money—to help struggling homeowners instead of, say, the struggling homeless? Or, for that matter, a child starving in Africa? There is room for a lot of legitimate debate about how much we should be taxed to help the less fortunate. But whatever level of assistance we agree on, I’d like to see it targeted to those who genuinely are less fortunate.

O.I.C.  How positively Zen.  Ohhhmm. . . . . . . . .

So then, tell me how the ARM mortgage crisis helps us feed the poor in Africa or house the homeless?  How did the issue of starving Ethiopians suddenly intersect with the foreclosure wave?  There is, indeed, a legitimate debate to be had on how much we should pay to help the less fortunate, as logically there must also be a legitimate debate as to just how much “less unfortunate” is “less unfortunate” enough to help.  So then, just as a baseline, how much has Mr. Steven E. Landsburg paid out to house the homeless?

What, precisely, is the plan for dealing with these two issues?  I assume Mr. Landsburg must have a plan, and I’ll betcha its a doozie.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps this is just another excuse to look the other way as people suffer; to do nothing because, golly!, there’s no much else we also haven’t done.

To paraphrase another author whose identity I can’t recall (I heard it on the Al Franken Show), it’s like your lost in the desert, dying of thirst and you happen upon Steven Landsburg.  You beg him for water, and he says, “well, wouldn’t you rather have lemonade?  It’s very refreshing!”  So, you say yes of course, and he hands you a packet of lemonade mix.

“There you go,” he says, “just add water!”

Rochester’s very own Steven E. Landsburg, professor of economics at the U of R, has been debating the subprime mortgage mess and the economic downturn on the LA times with Jason Furman of the Brookings Institute. What is amazing here is the utter lack of pathos at all for home owners who’ve lost their homes, and worse yet, the repetition of the canard that those with subprime mortgages simply lived beyond their means and deserved the punishment:

What can we blame? - Los Angeles Times

The sub-prime crisis has led to a lot of home foreclosures and a lot of unhappy former homeowners. But it was sub-prime lending that allowed many of those people to be homeowners in the first place. The fact that you got to live beyond your means for a few years should not create a presumption that you’ll get to live beyond your means forever.

Much to our enduring delight, Landsburg pays at least a bit of lip service to “sympathizing” for those “experiencing hardship,” a phrase that exudes all the empathy of a Microsoft error message. But when he says folks were “living beyond [their] means,” it’s worth mentioning that this is not a case of a few people accidentally getting free HBO for a week. We’re talking about people’s homes, and losing your home is likely bound to make you more than simply “unhappy.”

More importantly, let’s keep in mind just who it is that was living beyond their means. The same banks who make the determination as to whether or not you qualify for a mortgage (whether or not the house you want is “within your means”) also made the determination that lowering their standards was a profitable move. Joe Sixpack did not force the bank to give him a mortgage, but Joe Investor Class sure made it seem like a good idea. When the housing market lost value through no fault at all of the newly-minted homeowners - when the profit gravy train turned into a money pit for banks - it was also they that decided to then use said homeowners to rake in more cash by raising their interest rates through the roof.

And if you can’t find a way to be a bandage on the bloody wound of the banking industry, they don’t need your ass.

So really, the question is not about whether homeowners and hard working Americans lived beyond their means, but whether the banks did. If you think they should suffer for their crimes, I’m right there with ya, Bub. But of course, we know that’s not going to happen.