To reward home owners who made decisions the Jaded Apprentice has this to say:

Is this a hard thing to do? Absolutely. But the alternatives are all much worse and until now it seems this belief among the political class that their actions are not jeopardizing capitalism (because their ends are well intentioned) won’t be challenged until it’s too late. So when folks like Rick Santelli on CNBC make an understandable rant about the mortgage plan that clearly hit a nerve, you get responses like this that paint a picture of a condescending and tone-deaf Obama administration claiming we are just don’t understand their program because the ends justify their means. Bollocks. He’s administering painkillers in a way that will arbitrarily create winners and losers, rewrite the rules midway through the game, and curtail any healthy economic speculation that creates jobs and entire industries to the sidelines while we figure out how to play the new game.

Like everyone else, I’ll adjust my behavior to account for the new rules but in the mean time I’m going to be even more cautious about spending and new investment even while I consider extreme actions with my own obligations that might have been unthinkable when credit was so easy to get. The more likely the rules will change, the more comfortable the players get with pushing the envelope in ways that further stress the system. Instead of letting patience and time do their work, we add more perturbation until no stakeholder is left with hope. Eventually, desperation for stability in waters made more choppy by bad leadership enables the crowd to consider sacrifice the very essence of capitalism they used to hold sacred for the false hope of government mandated stability that has ended poorly in every society that has tried it.

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