Friday, December 19, 2008

Henry Hazlitt in 1946 over the current crisis

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 a oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everyone (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion. In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.

Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson

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