The Housing Boom and Bust

Who could be against "the American dream" of home ownership or so mean-spirited as to ask how much it would cost the taxpayers or what risks it would create for the whole financial system? Certainly not most Democrats or Republicans in Congress or the White House.

The media were also part of this crusade for more home ownership, more widely available. If some segments of the population did not own homes as much as others, that just showed that there was something wrong with the mortgage lending process, as far as editorial office philosophers were concerned.

Thomas Sowell plugs his new book which examines the causes of the problems in the financial markets and the housing markets (Hint: they were not caused by laissez-faire free markets).