The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity.
It’s clear now that the erosion of lindeng standards pushed prices up by increasing demand. This practice is what lead to the Crash of 1929 Great Depression. Prior to the crash “Coolidge Prosperity” was an artificial industrial boom because it was based largely on the fact that since credit was available for the first time, people paid only 10% down on a luxury car and paid the rest in installments, or paid for a house using mortgage payments rather than all at once. Playing the stock market became popular, and followed the same artificial sense of ownership as cars and homes that were bought only on credit and a certain amount of money down. That stock market immorality is what lead to the crash because people bought stocks totaling $10,000, so they paid $1,000 and owed $9,000. But as more people invested in those stocks, its overall worth would increase, so if they chose to cash out and sell all the stocks in their portfolio, they would have more than enough to pay what they owed. Thus everyone kept buying and buying and so stocks kept rising and rising. However is it really a matter of letting those who could not afford a house in the first place get a loan? It seems we will never learn our lesson about boom and bust if we keep up the practice of lindeng to first-time buyers with shaky financing and incomes. Still, if it were not for college loans, I would be screwed, so that is a racket I think is worth keeping around (though it could of course use reform!). However if my credit history was shaky would it then be immoral for me to take out a loan? It would be a little, I think! But this whole attitude of buying luxury things on credit (not education, which I think is a good investment) that began in the early 1900s is really a bulk of the blame. though I really do feel sympathy for people who want a house and mortgage since at the present moment, they cannot afford it. It’s not as important as an education, true, but at least it’s not really a luxury item, it’s really an understandable American dream for many families and individuals though I suppose times change and the idea of American dream has to change with it, so that many people will see the American Townhouse as the new ideal However it is a scary thought for me to picture a world in which the banks were not bailed out. What do you think the scenario would have looked like?