Posted by: Jock Gill

Joseph E. Stiglitz writes in a NY Times Op-Ed:

More than a million people have lost their homes in the past two years. A million more are expected to lose their homes in the next 12 months or so. Do you support a more direct program of relief for homeowners? The government pays more of the mortgage costs of rich homeowners, through larger tax deductions, than of poorer homeowners. What would you do to correct this injustice?

This is two million lost homes in 3 years. Or 1,800 lost homes per day, every day, for three years.

In really simple terms: 75 families per HOUR every hour for three years, are losing their homes to the wretched excesses enabled by the dogma of unregulated free market capitalism with its corollary that the market can do no wrong. Ask these millions of families about the myth of the sacred and error free unregulated market.

Will we ever learn? Or must we have to relearn this tragic lesson every 80 years?

The answer is neither the market nor the government is error free. We need both to be greater than the some of their parts. But both must also be transparent, regulated, and subject to the rule of law, with firmly enforced consequences for breaking the rules. For this to work, however, we have to accept that no peoples are exceptional, that we all have to live within limits, and that the laws of nature apply equally to all living things – without exception.

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