Texas Pundit

I’m pretty put out with the recent rescue of Wall Street.  Oh, I know its popular and will be used as an electioneering point by both the Obama camp and the McCain camp.  But that is besides the point of this post.  You see, I’m a professor sometimes at our University, and I have almost 40 years experience in my chosen profession and I can say beyond a doubt that sometimes the path to amazing success is through total failure. 

There are a lot of facts behind the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, de-regulation, lack of oversight, belief that people who can’t make payments ought to be able to buy a house anyway etc., etc., and etc.  That collapse led to a lot of other collapses and so on and Uncle Sugar rushes in to save the bunch.  Bollocks says I!

Sometimes I would wish that we would just let folks fail.  I’ve had some spectacular failures in my life, and I’ve learned from each and every one of them.  Oh, the learning came after beating my self in the head a few times and saying “Why the hell did I do that?”  In the long run however, I learned, and that same failure was never repeated again.  And so it would have been in this instance.  Would it have been hard?  Sure! but that is not the point.  The point here is that oversight of these two big institutions was lacking while a privileged few raked in the bucks by fudging the books.  We all failed when we allowed our hearts (everyone should be able to buy a home) to over rule our heads (”Sir, you make enough for a $40K home, not enough for that $120K home so we have to say no to your application for that $120K home, please call again”)At least that’s the way I see it on this side of the Brazos River!