Economy in dire straights, do you wonder what will happen next?
sell my homes
I recently read in a Reuters column by Patrick Rucker that President Obama is considering a plan to allow homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments to “surrender ownership” of their property; in exchange they may stay in the homes, paying rent to the new owner. The story does not indicate who the new owner would be; however, one would have to guess it would either be the banks or the government. When one considers the government holdings in major banks Bank of America and Citigroup as well as government mortgage loan financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you see that we are seeing a pattern of potentially one owner, the government.
This, of course, means American citizens are surrendering the “American Dream” which today has become synonymous with home ownership. This “dream” was considered so essential as to what it means to be an American that Congress and President Bush, in 2003, created and signed into law the American Dream Downpayment Initiative (ADDI), which was aimed to “increase the homeownership rate, especially among lower income and minorit(ies)” by helping “with the biggest hurdle to homeownership: downpayment and closing costs.”
The government, who created one economic mess by causing banks to lower their mortgage acceptance standards, is now going to fix that problem by giving many of those same people who benefited and presently suffer under ADDI an escape from their government induced mortgage responsibilities. On the surface President Obama’s potential plan sounds like a feasible solution to what will invariably be called an irresponsibility of the previous administration which Obama will be credited for solving. This causes the question: But what about the “American Dream”?
Private property has been tied up within the “unalienable rights” of individuals for this country from the time the Founders first gathered in Philadelphia in 1776; Jefferson, who penned those words “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” uses the same exact phrase in later letters he wrote to others with the exception of placing “property” in place of “pursuit of Happiness.” This equating of property and happiness is the essence of the “American Dream;” but as Mark Levin defines in his Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, “(p)rivate property is the material manifestation of the individual’s labor….” This means that the former is an extension of the latter, demonstrating what the latter has contributed to him or herself, his or her family and society as a whole. What would be otherwise intangible evidence becomes tangible taking the “form of income, real property [home ownership], or intellectual property.” From these the individual acquires happiness, the motivation for his pursuit.
The private property philosophy for the President’s plan concerning home ownership comes from a different source than that of America’s traditional foundations of 1776. Considering his mentors as far back as his adolescence and his decisions of late concerning his choice of allies and foes in the Honduran governmental affair, the President’s choice of philosophical foundations appears to be more in line with 1848, the year Karl Marx and Friedrich Engelspublished Manifesto of the Communist Party. Within that work Marx listed ten tenets whereby the communist movement may take over a country’s society; number one of these principles is the “(a)bolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.” While one would have to guess at this time as to the recipient of the former homeowner’s rent payments, the President’s plan seems to have risen directly from this standard.
www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1429265720090714?rpc=77
www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/programs/home/addi/
Rakove, Jack N, ed. Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2006.
Kaminski, John P, ed. The Quotable Jefferson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Levin, Mark. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. New York: Threshold Editions, 2009. p 62.
www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
