CNBC’s Rick Santelli Gets Pissed About Mortgages
Posted on 19. Feb, 2009 by Daniel Taylor in How's Business, Politics, Videos
I don't have any money, but sometimes I watch CNBC anyway just to see people like Jim Cramer and Rick Santelli get pissed. This morning Rick Santelli laid down the pwn on the Obama Administration's Mortgage Bail-Out plan and I have to say he's got a point: at what point do we need to stop sponsoring financial stupidity, both institutionally and individually?
Didn’t they already fund stupidity enough by giving those Wall St. assholes tax money last year? Right, that same money that ended up paying those guys all bonuses…
Rick Santelli is a perfect example of the rage free-market types feel when they can’t get others to pay for their ideological absolutism. Rick should be pointing the finger at the co-conspirators behind him on the stock exchange floor rather than at an incoming administration. The choices our country is left with now are between the bad and awful solutions the previous administration and their supporters have created for us and the even worse choice that Santelli and his ilk pretend to favor, which is to imagine that the market will fully correct if we continue to do nothing. That latter stance plays nicely with the traders on the market floor when you’re on TV defending their arrogance, but the rest of the country can’t afford to destroy what’s left of our economy so that Santelli can further his career by acting like a petulant child. Allowing media people to lead us over a financial cliff for their personal gain is something we should all be more wary of by now.
Unregulated capitalism got us to where we are today because people like Santelli treat free-market rhetoric as a religion rather than a theory. It reminds me of that classic skit where Jack Benny is being held up by a robber who repeatedly says, “Your money or your life!”, to which Jack responds, “I’m thinking!” It’s not so funny, however, when people like Santelli actually believe a question like that deserves serious consideration. We should all ignore such stupidity and instead try to discover the identity of the robber so we don’t get mugged again.