Stupidity is not Compassionate

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Just a short post to address two things at once. I have wanted to say something about the Wall Street meltdown, and I also needed to address a question raised in my last post on mercy and economics.

The bottom line first. Should the taxpayers be bailing out Behemoth Banks, Leviathan Lenders, and Marduk Mortgage? Of course not. Are they too big to fail? Sure. But that also means they they are too big to be allowed to continue their cozy relationship with politicians who always fix things, crises included, by pandering. And, as it turns out, the feds caused this particular meltdown by their pandering ways. Walter Williams explains it, straight up the middle.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 is a federal law that intimidated lenders into offering credit throughout their entire market and discouraged them from restricting their credit services to low-risk markets, a practice sometimes called redlining. The Federal Reserve Bank, keeping interest rates artificially low, gave buyers and builders incentive to buy and build, thereby producing the housing bubble. Lenders were willing to make creative interest-only loans, often high-risk “no doc” and “liar loans,” in order to allow people to buy more housing than they could afford. Of course, with the expectation that housing prices will continue to rise, it was no problem for lenders and borrowers but housing prices began to fall, leaving some people with negative home equity and banks in trouble.

Most people, when their house catches on fire, call the fire department. We, the American people, through our elected representitives, usually insist in a loud voice that the arsonists get back here on the double, and bring some extra gasoline. This is usually done in the name of compassion, prudence, and all the rest of it. We don’t live under a tyanny; we live under a tyrnanny.

For example, Idaho congressman Mike Simpson chided true blue Idaho congressman Bill Sali for opposing the bailouts. He said that Sali was putting ideology ahead of national interest. Yeah, Sali has an ideology that says arsonists should be locked up, and why don’t we call the fire department instead? There is no accounting for some people.

And this leads to my second point in this post. I was asked this, in the comments of my Justice Java post. “What would you suggest instead? Every time there’s someone trying to do something to help someone in a third world country, you’re quick to point out the problems. And I suppose there’s a place for that. But we are supposed to find ways of giving help.”

Yes, this is exactly right. While it is quite right that stupidity doesn’t work, and stupidity isn’t compassionate either, but having made that point, what does work? A foolish but goodhearted fellow might break someone’s neck while trying to move him after a car accident. But that reality is only a warning against doing this foolishly. We still have to figure out how to move the guy, and get him to some help.

God loves the world, and sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. That salvation is fundamentally deliverance from sin and corruption, but downstream it includes deliverance from disease, poverty, societal corruption, and more. But we can’t take the engine out the car so that, being much lighter now, it will go faster.

That engine is the gospel. The gospel is the solution to all the problems of culture, banking problems and third world problems included. The gospel is the heart of the Great Commission — preach the gospel, baptize the nations, teach them to live obediently. That obedience begins in their personal lives, and involves things like sobriety, chastity, and a solid biblical work ethic. If you do that, it will not be possible to prevent a middle class from developing. In the meantime, all attempts to go straight to the cultural benefits of the gospel, without the gospel itself being entrenched in that culture, is like a lifeguard trying to dry someone off before getting him off the bottom of the pool.