Monday, September 28, 2009

Quote - Henry Hazlitt, 1946

Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise. They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses. They encourage people to "buy" houses that they cannot really afford. They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things. They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly over expansion. In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.
Henry Hazlitt, 1946, Economics In One Lesson

I'm only 50 pages into this book. I usually post stuff on here showing predictions from Ron Paul, Jim Rogers, and Peter Schiff in regard to the economy as they come true. How about this prediction from 60 years ago? Those crazy, wacky, backwards Austrians.