Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now
I came across the following observation from Cody Willard on the FOX Business Network’s website this afternoon. While I don’t always agree with what Cody says— he struck a chord with me this time out. From “The Cody Word” blog:
If you risked money on real estate in the last few years and now you own couple houses and a lot in town – The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you chose not to sell any stock when your stock was up a bunch at some point in the last few years and now you don’t have enough money to pay your bills - The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you bought and sold people’s mortgages and got paid handsomely for your time in the last few years but now find your bank insolvent because you lied to yourself and your investors and your customers about how valuable those mortgages are - The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you borrowed billions in the last few years to take big companies private, collecting huge pay days and having the companies you buy stop investing in new technologies and laying off as many people as you can in the company in order to maximize short-term cash flows - The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you’re not making enough money to pay taxes or you’ve been laid off recently or been hurt on the job recently – The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you’re gambled with your developing country’s currencies and tax base and now your economy is in shambles and social unrest is rising - The government’s (IMF in this case) gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you’re a giant corporation in the world’s second largest economy and your exports are being hurt by the big improvement in your country’s currency in the last few weeks - The government’s (Japan’s government) gonna take from someone else and help you out.
If you’re an insurance company and you blindly wrote policies on corporate defaults, mortgage defaults, and currency derivatives without bothering to make sure you had enough reserves to actually pay for any, much less all, of those claims - The government’s gonna take from someone else and help you out.
And if you’ve been working, renting and saving - THE GOVERNMENT’S GONNA TAKE FROM YOU AND HELP SOMEONE ELSE OUT.
Confidence won’t return until private ownership of losses is enforced again. The more losses the government puts on us, the more they socialize our markets, the more they spend trying to buy confidence, the less confidence we’re going to have.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Give It Away” (1991)
YouTube Video Link
Source:
“Paulson, Obama, McCain: Money For Everyone Who Doesn’t Have It”
Cody Willard
Fox Business (The Cody Word Blog), October 28, 2008
