Housing

I saw Henry Cisneros, HUD Secretary under Bill Clinton, on a business show yesterday. The topic was whether or not to start up another tax credit program for new home buyers. He was for them because construction has always been such an important sector of the U.S. economy.

Cisneros is an articulate, accomplished man - and emblematic of the Democrat brain lock that is worsening a bad economic situation. Henry (insert the sound of a face slap), we already have too many houses! If we don't build any more for a year (another slap), we'll still have too many! Wanna know what's going to get construction healthy again? (I can't describe the sound of shoulders being shaken, but that's what goes here.) Do you? The marketplace!

Politicians - my code word for Democrats - live in dread of market solutions because their fingerprints don't appear on the happy outcomes. There are, of course, some unhappy outcomes, which they live for ("Never waste a good crisis.") Each overswing of the pendulum is another opportunity to burrow deeper into the economy, to pump addictive, regulatory medicine into a body that only needed a good night's sleep.

These naturally occurring excesses in the economy should be welcomed. They punish the stupid and greedy (real estate speculators, for example), and then life goes on; nearly everyone a bit smarter and wiser. Think of market excesses as natural disasters. While nasty to experience, they serve a greater good. Florida would die without hurricanes; they recharge the water systems. Forests require fires to propagate. Floods are nature's way of saying, "Why the hell did you build a city below sea level? You can rebuild it, moron, but I'll be back."

America got drunk on hyper-consumption. Households are accepting their hangovers. This November, elect people who will force the cure on the government. Treat it as an intervention. The next (and last) speech I want to hear from Obama should begin, "My name is Barack."