|
Posted by adam.dada on October 16th, 2006
Laws are titled to make voters think the laws do something. Laws are written with some intensions that can be described as “good for society,” but all laws have loopholes. A law against murder doesn’t say “Don’t kill anyone,” instead it makes specific descriptions and we have a mess of legal issues when one person kills another.
Chicago created such a law in order to combat the unintended consequences of federal actions. The Federal government made it easy to get money cheaply, and the regulatory boards changed policies to let banks give that money away easily. This meant that people who shouldn’t own a home were able to get approved — the banks don’t care anyway since they had the federal regulatory recommendations to blame if things went south. And south they went. Now the South Side of Chicago is seeing more foreclosures, defaults, and condemned/abandoned homes — people who couldn’t pay the mortgage surely didn’t pay for maintenance and a clean home. Chicago tried to fix the Fed’s errors by creating a law preventing people from getting a mortgage — even if they were able to pay it.
The Chicago Sun Times has a nice run down of this law in an article titled Mortgage law socks home sales. Some realtors are blaming the law for the 45% drop in homes bought on the South Side in just one month. Painful, but the drop is a combination of oversupply of homes, and undersupply of easy credit, and a laws preventing one person from transacting with another.
What’s the point of all these messes? Originally, government likes to get people easy money — in creates easy voters. When the people fail, they don’t blame the government for their standards, they blame the banks, their employers, their neighbors, their family and even God for not “blessing them.” Common sense tells me that the only person to blame is yourself — especially if you’re entering an agreement that you can only HOPE to meet, rather than being able to meet it in full today.
Government giveth by taking away from others, then they taketh away from you. Don’t sign the dotted line — all that legal garbage on the pages before it was written to avoid the laws for the powerful party, and stick the less powerful party with the bill.
Discuss this article at the anarcho-capitalism forum.