For some reason several articles from Townhall.com came across the feed reader from dates in the past. One that caught my eye was by Walter E. Williams titled Congressional Problem Creation. The first line of the article is so accurate I’m going to highlight it here:

Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.

We used to have a term for that that included the word “circle”.

One of the points he made in this article was in regard to the governments hand in creating the mortgage problems we’re facing today.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, whose provisions were strengthened during the Clinton and Bush administrations, is a federal law that mandates or intimidates lenders to offer credit throughout their entire market and discourages them from restricting their credit services to high-income markets, a practice known as redlining. The Community Reinvestment Act encouraged banks and thrifts to make so-called “no doc” and “liar” loans to customers who had no realistic ability to pay them back. A decade of monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve Bank, contributing to the housing bubble, encouraged lending institutions to take risks they otherwise would not have taken. Government actions created the subprime crisis and now government-proposed “solutions,” such as foreclosure holidays, bailouts and further regulation of financial institutions, to the problems they created will create more problems.

While you can read article after article on the “mortgage crisis”, there is no mention (at least I haven’t seen it) of the role government meddling played in creating this mess, once again underlining the truth behind Ronald Reagan’s famous quote: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”