Leadership and Crisis, by Gov. Bobby Jindal: on Budget & Economy


Andrew Cuomo: 1990s HUD: Sued banks to make more mortgage loans

The federal government sued banks to force them to make risky mortgage loans. Andrew Cuomo, then secretary of Housing & Urban Development, bragged at a 1998 press conference about reaching a settlement with a major lender worth billions of dollars. Cuomo even admitted he knew some of these loans would not be paid back. Nice thing to do with other people's money.

Some of the blame belongs to consumers, who borrowed money they knew they couldn't repay. They traded up & borrowed more than they could handl because, well, we all deserve a big house, don't we? Owning a home is part of the American Dream. But getting it through an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage is more like a nightmare.

Predictably, after the meltdown the liberals called on the government to adopt strict new regulations to ensure it will not happen again. (Good luck with that.) But more regulations can't solve what is largely an ethical problem within the culture. Unchecked avarice at every level has taken a toll on our economy

Source: Leadership and Crisis, by Bobby Jindal, p.266 Nov 15, 2010

Milton Friedman: Every politically free society has a free market

Restricting economic freedoms limits our political freedoms. History teaches that the two are intimately entwined. Economic freedom disperses political power and distributes it among the people. With a free market system we separate economic power from political power, so that each may offset the other. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Morton Feldman put it, "Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity." Economic independence is what allows people to protect their political rights and freedoms. Once the powerful hand of government subsumes our economic independence, it immediately becomes more difficult to stand up that government. The natural logic of capitalism requires democracy.
Source: Leadership and Crisis, by Bobby Jindal, p.165-166 Nov 15, 2010

  • The above quotations are from Leadership and Crisis,
    by Bobby Jindal.
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