Who Is To Blame?

I want to blame someone. I want someone to pay for doing this to our economy, for taking $2300 for every man woman and child in this country to pay for a screw up that should never have happened. I want to find the person or persons responsible and make sure they pay for their crimes.

And I'm not alone. But, in discussing this with like-minded individuals, a big problem came up, and that's how do we identify who DESERVES to be punished? I don't want a big witch-hunt with everyone looking for SOMEONE to pay, just so we'll all feel better.

Anyway, the rest of this is a slightly reworked e-mail I sent out to a group of family and friends who were thinking along the same lines, and since I exhorted them to help me figure out who the guilty are, I figured I should post it here as well, to see if anyone in my vast reading audience has any thoughts.

Liam.

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OK, I've been thinking about this some more, and the very real question I've come up with is this: How do we determine who was at fault?

Was it the CEOs and other executives at the companies? They would seem an obvious choice, but the fact is that the things they were doing, although perhaps ethically questionable, were entirely legal and weren't being regulated, and you can make the argument that in any company, the executive team's job is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, and if this was a legal path to make money (and more importantly, if "everyone else was doing it" such that by NOT participating they ran a real risk of losing out to other companies), was what they were doing justification for prison?

OK, so how about the regulators? Shouldn't they have stopped it? Well, from what I understand, there's been fairly minimal regulation on these financial shenanigans, and so I'm not sure it was within the job description of the regulating authorities to put a stop to it.

You could make an argument that President Bush and the Republican rubber-stamp Congress he had for the first six years is to blame, for consistently putting people into positions of regulatory authority who have significant ties to the industries over which they are supposed to watch, but that's how his constituents wanted it, the Republicans being the party of deregulation.

You could make the same argument about President Clinton and the Democratic Congress he had at the beginning, who pushed through the laws being pointed to that required a certain percentage of all mortgages written had to go to less advantaged people.

The truth, and I've come to believe this about most of the woes in this country, is that we have two fundamentally different philosophies going on, and they are incompatible. Either would work, on its own, but they conflict in really bad ways.

As an example, take national security. As an over-simplified example, the Democratic philosophy is to be friends with everyone so that no one WANTS to attack us, and then maintain a somewhat minimal armed forces to take care of the opportunists, while being "good neighbors" to prevent everyone else from attacking.

The Republican philosophy, equally over-simplified, is to arm ourselves to the teeth and be the big kid on the block, so that no one dares mess with us. Assert our authority. Be the alpha dog. Make it just too scary a proposition to attack us.

Either philosophy could work, but when you combine them it's like combining fire and dynamite. Assert your authority until people are afraid but also angry, and then switch to the "carrot" approach. People don't react to your suddenly being good neighbors as fast as you expect, and if you cut back on defense too quickly, boom.

I think the same thing is true here, too. The Democratic plan (still simplified, this time mostly because I'm not strong on economic issues) for mortgages was to help make owning houses more available to the under privileged (something which President Bush also talked about early in his tenure), but required a lot of oversight and regulation to make sure it wasn't abused. The Republican plan (also simplified) involved deregulating, but wouldn't have set up the plan for disadvantaged borrowers to borrow money.

And when you take a plan that only works safely with a lot of regulation and combine it with people in charge who fundamentally believe in deregulation where ever possible, boom.

So really, as much as I'd love to see someone "pay" for this, to be able to point to someone and say "You, this is YOUR fault, YOU did this, now it's time for you to spend the rest of your life in a small room with a cell mate named 'Bubba' who thinks you've got a purty mouth", the fact is that I'm not sure who to point to and say that about. I'm not sure if there's any one person or group of people more at fault than any other, or that most of the people who contributed to the problem did enough on their own to cause it.

Now, all of that said, if you have any ideas as to how to identify the guilty, or who in this whole mess should have known better and fell down on the job, I’m all ears. But until I have some idea of WHO I think should be punished, I feel kind of strange writing to my Senators and Representative demanding that "someone" be held accountable, because that way lies witch hunts, seeking someone to blame to assuage our anger, rather than for justice.