Kalan: Financial crisis: Any price is right
Just when we thought the recession couldn’t get any more recessed, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are in trouble. They may sound like Depression-era bank robbers, but they’re actually companies who buy mortgages and resell the pieces. Mortgages — from the latin root mortes meaning “death to” and gauges meaning “your dreams” — are loans which shackle people to houses they can’t afford for decades at a time. This keeps people in one place so their otherwise constant movement won’t cause the continent to sink. Unfortunately, Fannie and Freddy currently hold thousands of faulty mortgages and IndyMac bank — Freddie’s child from a previous marriage — has shut down. This recession’s hitting the Mac family pretty hard.
The ongoing mortgage crisis-based collapse of our economy might convince you that something as intangible as debt shouldn’t be cut up and sold like sausages or pig iron. After all, Freddie and Fanny were basically retailing promises, which are notoriously unreliable. But doing so represented America’s most cherished principle: Everything has a price. Even intangible concepts and intentions have specific dollar values, and we’ve successfully attached monetary figures to seemingly noncommercial objects like water, the air above buildings and happiness. We won the Cold War because “nothing” in freedom is more profitable than “something” under communism.
Our “complete marketing of reality” may seem cold and heartless, but it’s necessary. Pre-revolutionary societies bartered solely in physical goods while leaving concepts and emotions alone, causing them to die of the plague or be burned as witches. Similarly, the Native Americans believed nobody could truly own land, and just look what we did to them.
We can save the country by harnessing our ability to commercialize horribly inappropriate things. How? Establish prices for human life. The founders said all men were created equal, but they were wrong. And that worth disparity introduces the kind of dynamic new market our economy needs. Talk about family values, you’ll know the value of your family in gold and rubles! Some would argue this cheapens life, but if life has no price, then by definition it has no market value, and then life is worse than cheap — it’s free. Anything worth having has a price, and once we reaffirm that, the crisis will end. Or at the very least only affect people too poor for us to care about.
Elliott Kalan is a producer for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”
