Wheat from the Chaff

America's Housing Crisis - A Moral Dilemma?

The following video from 60 Minutes is a sobering look at America's continuing housing crisis.

It's also an interesting discussion of a central contradiction in capitalism. On one hand, business people and corporate entities often make bloody-minded decisions that leave individuals jobless and homeless. As "rational actors" pursuing "the bottom line", these capitalists are rarely condemned by our elites. Indeed, their "tough minded" decisions are often lauded as good business. On the other hand, the very same economic decisions by individual citizens and unions are almost always assessed (and condemned) in moral terms, terms which North Americans have historically internalized against their own interests.

Yet it now appears that this ideological double-standard is being exposed by the mortgage problems faced by millions of Americans. As a result, we can catch a glimpse of the political underpinnings inherent in the supposedly amoral world of economics.