Signs of depression

• A run on a bank. (Huw)
• Bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (LRC)
• Paramount was not able to secure $450 million in new financing through Deutsche Bank because the credit markets have been wrecked by the Fed. This is only the beginning, folks. (LRC blog)

There is Steve Sailer’s and others’ point that what looked like the state being charitable and just (equal opportunity, which of course is just and which a truly free market gives, as Mises explained) really wasn’t: enabling easy (zero-down for example) mortgages for poor people not known for being able to afford houses or honour debts, pushing that, and when the scam collapsed of course everybody else ends up having to pay for it, just like the neocons’ war on Iraq. Here the state was trying to throw up a Potemkin village (a good metaphor for rotting foreclosed exurbs if I may say so) of equal outcomes, which of course are unnatural, really unfair and don’t promote flourishing in the long run.