RE: A very basic printing question re XY3

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

> >  (Atlas Shrugged, p. 1031)
> I love this Harry. How utterly shocking it must have seemed to an American
> society which was still in 1957 filled with constitutional and very dear
> do-gooders of a type now apparently extinct. Still, we can, fifty years
> on, see a problem with Atlas. It came just the other day, when Alan
> Greenspan went to explain the meltdown to Congress . . . and he shrugged!
Yeah, Greenspan is a piece of work. To name drop: I met him several times
in the 60s, and I was at one party at Ayn Rand's apartment that Greenspan
attended. I think he really did care personally for her, in the early days.
But as early as 1970, I decided he had sold out (on the basis of a speech
he gave that year). And his Congressional testimony--"don't blame me, blame
freedom"--was the last step in a long, long series of betrayals of Ayn Rand.
So, the problem is not with "Atlas" but with the regulatory state. How come
the one million (count 'em: one million) regulations didn't prevent this
crisis? How come Greenspan's Fed gets a free pass, when it created the
overly cheap mortgages?
I know you're waiting for my solution to the crisis, so here it is.
De-regulate. The best short-term measure, for the pivotal issue of housing,
would be: open the doors to immigration. Currently, we let in 500,000
annually. Let's ten-tuple that to 5,000,000 annually, and they will bid our
real-estate prices back up. Think about it. I've heard the slogan we should
use: "Buy a house, get a Green Card."
Restrictions on immigration are immoral anyway. People don't qualify as
criminals because they reside in a "foreign" country. Immigration barriers
violate individual rights.




Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx