It's really not clear to me why conservatives seem to think that the proper response to the financial crisis is to blame "minorities," despite all available evidence, but it seems to be practically an article of faith. An atheist might as well argue with a believer as to whether or not angels exist. It's practically a sacrament. You can't really be a conservative until you've established that your knee-jerk response to certain issues is that non-white people are at fault. Take Byron York's conversation with Matt Taibbi:
B.Y.: I think that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also major factors. And I believe that many of the problems in the mortgage area can be attributed to the confluence of Democratic and Republican priorities: the Democrats' desire to give mortgages to people, particularly minorities, who could not afford them, and the Republicans' desire to achieve an "ownership society," in part by giving mortgages to people who could not afford them. Again, I believe that if you are suggesting that the financial crisis is a Republican creation, or even more specifically a McCain creation, I think you're on pretty shaky ground.
Reading the rest of the conversation, it's clear that Taibbi has a better understanding of how the economy works than York. But I still find it disturbing that York thinks the problem is that Democrats wanted to give mortgages to "people, particularly minorities" as though there's something particularly reprehensible about giving a loan to someone with bad credit if they happen to be black. If only these loans were restricted to white people with bad credit, we'd be okay.
Of course, white people received the largest number of sub-prime loans (72.5 percent to be exact) so this line of argument is ludicrous. Moreover, Fannie and Freddie didn't gain more of the sub-prime market out of generosity towards people of color, they did it to keep pace with the market, in which banks and companies not regulated by the Community Reinvestment Act did most of the sub-prime lending. Moreover, without the profit motive for integrating all this risk into the financial system via mortgage backed securities, the credit crisis could not have occurred.
But hey, you can't argue with faith. If the party of personal responsiblity wants to blame everyone else for their failures, particularly everyones who happen not to be white, who am I to argue with faith?
--A. Serwer
