Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise.
They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to buy houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an over-supply of houses. They temporarily over stimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody. May mislead the building industry into an eventually over expansion.
In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment. —Henry Hazlitt
While rising prices are likely to reflect changes in supply and demand, people ignorant of economics may attribute price rises to greed. —Thomas Sowell
While rising prices are likely to reflect changes in supply and demand, people ignorant of economics may attribute price rises to greed. —Thomas Sowell
The most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.
This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations.
The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives.
This means, among other things, that EVEN a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.
