— The Community Reinvestment Act is to blame for the financial crisis, but it so powerfully serves Democrats' interests that they'll do anything to protect it — including revising history. The CRA should be abolished, along with the government-sponsored enterprises that fueled the secondary market for subprimes.

— If the banks, which frequently lent irresponsibly, and many homeowners, who often borrowed irresponsibly, are getting government assistance, Mr. Lawrence says he believes sober souls like himself are also due a break. “Why am I being punished for having bought a house I could afford?” he asked. “I am beginning ...

— Confident the American people are primed for his brand of "change," Obama maintained his anti-capitalist theme. Contrary to the Obama narrative, however, free-market capitalism is not at the root of the current mortgage industry crisis, but rather the very socialism he hawks. The historical record makes this fact unmistakably clear.

— Nearly everyone seems persuaded that the financial system that has been behaving so perversely in the recent past and has not yet finished doing so is one of purebred deregulated free market capitalism. This is not the case (just as the late lamented Soviet Union was not a purebred socialist ...

— The only piece of good news in the "perfect storm" of bad policy is that policymakers now have a road map to avoid disastrous housing bubbles in the future. If politicians want a stronger economy (or, to be more accurate, if they want a stronger economy more than they want ...

— It's all part of a nasty adjustment in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble. The federal government is trying to find a way to mitigate the impact on families losing their homes, a difficult task because many of them can't afford their mortgages and, in some cases, ...

— The closer an enterprise is to the taxpayer's wallet, the more congressional oversight it requires. The further away you get from that wallet, the more freedom you should give people, because they are risking their own money, not the taxpayers.

— Absent this implicit guarantee, lenders would probably have been much more conservative in approving borrowers and setting interest terms, and in requiring documentation of incomes and higher down payments. Market forces would have kept out unqualified buyers and prevented home-price appreciation from exceeding the growth in household income.

— Under McCain's plan, neither the borrowers nor the lenders bear the cost of their risky choices. Taxpayers do, to the tune of $300 billion or so—his estimate of the difference between what the government will pay to buy mortgages at their face value and what it will get back at ...

— We might ask what's so sacrosanct about 435 representatives? Why not 600, or 1,000, or 7,500? Here's part of the answer and, by the way, I never cease to be amazed by the insight and wisdom of our founders: James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, argued that the ...

— Moral hazard just hasn't gotten much play this news cycle. Look for its stock to rise in a few years, when journalists and analysts get around to questioning the new conventional wisdom that having the government own a chunk of the companies it regulates is such a great idea.

— If Sen. Obama had been asked for an example of "Republican deregulation," he would probably have cited the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 (GLBA), which has become a popular target for Democrats searching for something to pin on the GOP. This is puzzling. The bill's key sponsors were indeed Republicans, but ...

— Without Fannie and Freddie's implicit guarantee of government support, would the mortgage-backed securities market and the subprime part of it have expanded the way they did? Perhaps. But before we conclude that markets failed, we need a careful analysis of public policy's role in creating this mess. Greedy investors obviously ...

— Whatever well-intentioned reasons existed in 1913 for creating the Federal Reserve -- to provide an elastic currency to soften the blow of economic contractions caused by "irrational exuberance" (and that will never be conquered, so long as humans have aspirations) -- one would be hard-pressed to say that the financial ...

— How ironic to watch the same party that today blames the failure of Wall Street on a lack of regulation, fight so strongly against those who would hold Fannie and Freddie accountable to existing regulations.