Tuesday, March 17, 2009

*Sigh* The Race Warriors Are At It Again

So the lovely people of the NAACP are making even bigger asses of themselves. They’re suing Wells Fargo for making “predatory” subprime loans to black people. This is, of course, racism.

 

Wait, what?

 

Here’s a quick review of how subprime lending came to be: It started with Jimmy Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act, which Clinton heavily reinforced. It used unconstitutional semi-government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to force banks to comply with a liberal vision of what lending should be. See, Carter and Clinton thought it completely unfair, and probably racist, that relatively few minorities were homeowners. The real reason for that, of course, is that poor people, who can’t afford to own a home, are disproportionately black. Banks didn’t make loans to poor people was not because a lot of them are black but because THEY CAN’T PAY BACK THE LOAN. The whole point of loans is that people can afford to pay them back; if you can’t, too bad, you don’t get the loan. I make $7.00 an hour working about 15 hours a week during school, 35 or so over Christmas and summer breaks. That’s not a lot. I wouldn’t expect a bank to give me a $50,000 loan to get a new Mercedes, because there is absolutely no way I could possibly pay it back.

 

You see the problem here? When the banks didn’t make loans to people who can’t afford them, it’s because they’re racists who want to deny every black person the right to own a home. When they do make the loans, it’s because they’re racists who want to trap black people, take everything they own, and leave them to starve in the streets. If you don’t give people something they haven’t earned and can’t afford, and some of those people happen to be black—well, that’s racism. If you do, and then the whole unsustainable system collapses—well, that must be a vast racist conspiracy too.

I’ve said it before, but I can’t say it enough: victimhood advocates, like the NAACP, NOW, GLAAD, RAINBOW/PUSH, and any other of the Truth to Power alphabet soup, are desperate to keep themselves relevant. They have power as long as they can pretend their favorite brand of discrimination is still alive, when in reality most of us have moved on. I don’t give a flying crap what race, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation someone is, or what handicap they have. I don’t want anyone, regardless of their hyphen, to take on debt they have no hope of repaying, to get a job they aren’t qualified for and can’t perform, to earn a living by looting other peoples’ earnings, or to violate anyone’s rights to life, liberty, or property. And if you do start violating those basic rights, I don’t care who you are, you need to face some consequences. I think most people feel like that, or at least close to it.

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