Opinion: Obama Subsidizes the Wrong People

The Obama mortgage bailout plan is a subsidy to all the wrong people, a continuance of the economically errant past, and generally expensive and nonsensical.

But I could hold my nose and support it under one big condition. Okay, one big condition and one small condition.

First, it needs to contain an apology. President Obama needs to say that a big part of the reason the housing market in the U.S. is so screwed up is that government has for decades been using housing as a misguided social engineering experiment. There is a lethally romanticized vision of home ownership in this country, one that says that right after flag and country, comes a 2,200 square-foot house with a yard.

It's not true, and it never has been. A house is an asset. Pretending otherwise is a form of childishness that we can no longer afford. ...