One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

Here's an interesting article on the subprime mortgage situation:

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/IBD-0001-23168675.htm

The author examines the causes of the crisis, and comes to the conclusion that too much government regulation is one of them. Many factors contributed to crisis, of course, but I'm inclined to agree that too much government probably had something to do with it too. Of course, I think too much government is behind most problems.

I suspect that now the government is going to make things even worse trying to come up with a "solution." There's been a lot of talk about preventing the banks from foreclosing on the homes of subprime borrowers (something that's already happened to some extent, although it's not permanent - yet), buying out the loans, or taking other regulatory action to "fix" things. One thing you can be sure of, if the government gets involved in the "solutions" business, it's going to cost taxpayers.

Speaking of taxpayers, have you noticed that news sources almost never refer to government money as taxpayer money? They refer to this-or-that governmental agency's "budget" or simply say the dollar amount- but you don't see "1 billion taxpayer dollars used to shoot down a satellite" (for example) very often. Hmm.

Finally: mainstream news annoys me. Today the major story is that John McCain maybe possibly had an improper relationship with a female lobbyist... eight years ago. This story, which is worthy of several front pages and much discussion on television news, apparently, is based on accounts from anonymous sources. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has definitively accepted numerous illegal campaign donations, and I don't remember any of those headlining the New York Times. Not to mention all the other questionable activities she and her husband have definitively been a part of, which probably haven't even made it onto the Times' back page this election season. I try not to think about how many people are getting all of their information from these sources, and doing no research (or thinking) for themselves.

The title of today's post is a quote by Thomas B. Reed.