OffTopic: One of my tech friends pointed me towards this controversial recent post by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, entitled, "How The U.S. Government Engineered The Current Economic Crisis".

Arrington pulls no punches when he writes:

Every time we get ourselves into an economic mess, there's usually some milestone idiocy we can point back to as the government action that made the meltdown inevitable...

I added my own comment to his blog post:

Thank you for having the courage to write this post, Michael. You may have alienated some readers, but you've gained the respect of other readers such as myself.

As some commenters have noted, the blame does not rest solely on one particular political party or the other but the very fact of massive and inappropriate government involvement in the lending industry -- a policy supported by both political parties.

It's clearly not in the interest of lenders to make loans to people who can't pay them back. But when government creates artificial incentives that rewards banks for doing so (with the implied promise that taxpayers will pick up the tab if anything goes wrong), then the current mess is exactly the result one would expect.

The worst part of it is that the mess is being blamed on the "free market", when in fact it was caused by government interference in the free market.

That's like blaming the *car* for getting into a car accident instead of blaming the fact that one was driving while yakking on a cellphone and trying to access the onboard GPS system while getting a stick of gum out of the glove compartment...

And commenter Jason Crawford posted a link to a recent excellent article by Yaron Brook in Forbes which discusses how bad government policy has led to the current crisis: "The Government Did It".