Thursday, April 19, 2018
Thought of the Day
One of the central problems of liberalism is that its operating dogmas sooner or later collide with each other. Take the way antitrust operated for decades: if you charged the same price as your competitors, you were guilty of collusion and price-fixing. But if you charged less than your competitors, you were guilty of predatory pricing. (Indeed this is exactly how antitrust investigations began decades ago before we came to our senses.) Or take bank lending: if a bank doesn’t lend to the urban poor and minorities, it is guilty of “red-lining.” But if a bank does lend to poor and minority customers who default at high rates (as happened in 2008), then you’re guilty of predatory lending.
Steven Hayward
Labels: Steven Hayward quote
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That quote grossly oversimplifies "predatory lending", and makes it hard to take the rest of the quote seriously
No one forced anyone to take out a loan he or she probably could not pay back. The federal government did, however, force banks to make loans to people who probably could not pay them back. Does that shed any more light on the deeply convoluted actions called predatory lending?
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