Coruscation

There's several lines of thought here.

First, clearly, there were regulatory failures. The fact of the matter is that teaser mortgages were the result of the overriding of usury laws and preemption of state lender laws in favor of lax federal regulations that favored "the free market". And we don't have regulations of Credit Default Swaps and Hedge Funds because some powerful lobbies made "free market" arguments that libertarians accept. All these things contributed a lot more to the crisis than whether Fannie and Freddie guaranteed some loans they should have (remember, most of the bad mortgages were securitized by the private sector) or whether the government was overzealous in promoting minority homeownership.

Second, while Ilya is right about the governmental promotion of homeownership not being a libertarian idea, it is also not really one that libertarians spent a lot of effort trying to fight. Indeed, libertarians were promoting the "Ownership Society" along with conservatives, because libertarians tend to believe that property ownership has several beneficial effects on society. This doesn't mean that libertarians were necessarily supportive of efforts to lean on lenders, but it does mean that libertarians weren't exactly policing this issue (because it meant going after political allies as well as taking on an ideological contention about ownership that they had some sympathy with or mixed feelings towards).

Third, I think it's too broad to blame anything like this on libertarianism. Libertarians don't have a lot of political power; conservatives do and liberals did and will. But what Ilya seems to be really after is to counter any efforts to blame this crisis on laissez faire policies or free market policies. And that position seems untenable. Of course you can point to actions of the government that weren't good ideas which may have contributed to this. But the reality is that one of the problems with the free market is that if people can take their money out in the very short term, they don't have much of an incentive to price in longer term risk. And these mortgages lasted for 15 or 30 years. Thus, as long as someone else was going to be able to internalize the risk of a default, it made sense to make bad loans. This was true even without any pressure from the government or any "ownership society" programs.

The free market did this, because there are not any market mechanisms in the mortgage backed securities market to ensure the mitigation of long-term risk.

-- Dilan Esper responds to Ilya Somin