Obama "love": You've gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet

Our President at Thursday morning's National Prayer Breakfast:

When I talk about making sure insurance companies aren’t discriminating against those who are already sick, I do it because ... I believe in God’s command to 'love thy neighbor as thyself.'

Forcing insurance companies to cover people who are already sick (a key Obamacare provision) is like forcing automobile insurers to cover accidents that applicants have already been involved in. It is not insurance at all. It is confiscation, paid for by those who are actually trying to buy insurance instead of get a handout.

In Obama's mind, "love" commands this complete destruction of the very concept of an insurance market. Sounds more like the Stalinist dictum that "you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet." Ditto for Obama's other example of his supposed love:

... making sure that unscrupulous lenders aren’t taking advantage of the most vulnerable among us.

What "advantage" have banks been taking? Why they have very cruelly been stuffing the pockets of bad credit risks with far more money then these people could ever pay back. This has been so advantageous for the banks that we had to bail half of them out with tax dollars. Nevertheless, Title XIV of the Frank-Dodd Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act does indeed "impose obligations on mortgage originators to only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans."

Why would the government have to order banks not to throw money away on bad credit risks? Because for years the government has been enforcing anti-discrimination laws that require banks to lend to bad credit risks. That's where the mortgage meltdown came from. Using the Community Reinvestment ACT for leverage, the Alinskyite "community organizer" group ACORN succeeded in forcing banks to lower their credit standards on the grounds that existing standards (standards that only lend to borrowers who are likely to repay their loans) had a disparate impact on blacks.

(Read the whole thing. In addition to forcing banks to make bad loans, ACORN also succeeded in forcing the quasi-government mortgate companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase these loans and implicitly guarantee them with taxpayer dollars, which is what turned the A-bomb into an H-bomb.)

Obama was intimately involved in all of this. He worked for ACORN as a lawyer and participated in at least one suit against a bank for having too discriminatory (too strict) a credit standard. The woman who pioneered ACORN's pressure tactics against the banks, Madeleine Talbot, also brought Obama in to teach Alinsky tactics to ACORN personnel. You may have seen the picture of Obama teaching Saul Alinsky's "power analysis" at the University of Chicago Law School:



Obama trained ACORN leaders and foot-soldiers in these commie pressure tactics for years. Here is Obama meeting with the ACORN in 2004:




Oops, I did it again

So Obama screwed everything up when, as "the senator from ACORN," he helped force banks to loan to bad credit risks, and now he thinks the answer is to force them not to lend to bad risks. But guess what? Title X of Frank-Dodd creates and entire new bureaucracy dedicated specifically to enforcing the very anti-discrimination laws that Title XIV of Frank-Dodd is trying to counteract!

Title X is Elizabeth Warren's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to enforce The Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, and a mish-mash of other re-distributionist and anti-discriminatory lending laws.

Each of these moves is in itself destructive. If banks are left alone they won't make bad loans and they won't leave profitable loans un-provided on account of anyone's race. Some individual bank might pass up profitable loans on account of race, but they would just be leaving money on the table for some non-racist bank to come in and pick up, which means some non-racist bank will come in and pick it up.

Remember what it took to stop such equal economic opportunity in the old south: a vast network of Jim Crow laws, working to outlaw the thousands of ways that free economic activity kept treating blacks as equals. Markets are an anti-discriminatory force. To maximize anti-discriminatory effect they should run free. There is no possible benefit to roping them down with anti-discrimination law, but there is vast potential to do any amount of harm, as the mortgage meltdown demonstrates.

Marvel at the sheer manic insanity, ordering one contradictory mandate after another when every single one of them is in itself destructive. We've got Moe Howard in the Oval Office.



You know Moe's gonna get mad, and Curly (should be Elizabeth Warren) is not backing down so: Egg fight!!!!!!! It's a Three Stooges breakfast party, with our lives hurtling like cream pies through the air. Smash everything! Leave no table unturned! Feel the Obama love.