You’ve gotta love this McCain Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, excoriating Fannie and Freddie Mac for their supposedly endemic problems and the do-nothing Congress that let it get so out of control. Best of all, McCain blames lobbyists, presumably meaning the 20 or so lobbyists that run his campaign and have advocated for Fannie or Freddie over the years. I’ll bet he’s giving them hell over the crab dip at fundraisers.
But wait. . . .
Fannie and Freddie have lobbyists? Does anyone see the logical fallacy in this? Yes, of course. Government agencies do not lobby each other. Fannie Mae and Fredie Mac, while setup by the Congress, are autonomous agencies over which Congress has had very little control. Until now, that is.
And so I’m confused: is John McCain advocating Congress and the government take more control of the national housing economy? Because Fannie and Freddie are easily the largest institutions in that market. That means that the mortgage industry is for all intents and purposes a national industry at this point. Dig that? You can’t have a national health care plan, but you can have a nationalized mortgage industry.
That doesn’t sound very Republican to me.
And I say it every time we get on the subject of the Fannie/Freddie near-collapse: the problem is not any internal structural problems at these two agencies, though I’m sure there’s probably plenty of those. The problem is that the government is stepping in to save the country from the depression that could have happened because of reckless private banking. Not that anyone’s going to bother reporting that, but I though you might be interested.
