Letters to the Editor
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@Bacchus
I see a few ways to read Andrew Leonard's article. To pick two:
- The incentives born of government policy and greed were so substantial as to create millions of vacant homes while millions remain homeless. This is a poor outcome.
- There is great wealth in the United States, and the disparity is great between those with and those without. This frames a moral obligation to resolve this disparity.
I choose to read this article as a moral commentary. I saw the groundwork being placed for a moral justification to compel collective action to benefit one over another. This is a common justification for theft. If I was wrong in this view, I hope Mr Leonard considers that others may have also misread his intentions.
As to the charge that I am some corporate apologist or supporter of the current administration, I would encourage you to look at any of my prior letters. For example, on February 26th I wrote about how we are often distracted from the core problems facing this nation, including:
... issues like a war costing thousands of lives and spreading anti-US and pro-terrorist sentiment to an entire region, massive trade deficits crushing the value of the US dollar in which all of us are saving for retirement, unprecedented budget deficits, record national debt, lost individual liberties, rampant corporatism throughout the executive of legislative branches of government, a looming series of bank collapses, the purchasing of our American employers by sovereign wealth funds based in China and the Middle East...
Part of me also wants to believe that we need to spend more time directly talking about the future we have mortgaged for our children, both in terms of their standard of living, their lifetime of debt to foreign governments, and their daunting struggle to overcome anti-US hatred by much of the globe.
Finally, I disagree with your condemnation of private charity. In my view many individuals find joy in such work and generosity, and it does generate real world results. However, the coercion of taking by taxes for the unquestioned use of others breeds resentment among those who might otherwise be more giving and sympathetic.