California to bail out upside down mortgages

Fox News reports that California is going spend up to $100,000 of taxpayer money to everyone who has an upside down mortgage.

Richard Green, a professor of real estate at the University of Southern California, said, "At the end of the day, you have a choice, do you want to be sanctimonious or do you want to solve the problem. And I want to solve the problem. Is this unfair? Absolutely. A lot of things in life are unfair. But to clear out the inventory in certain parts of the country I think it is necessary to do something like principle reduction."

Presenting a false choice is a typical leftist rhetorical tactic. Your choice, he says, is between being sanctimonious and solving the problem. Supporting the bailout is apparently the only way to avoid being sanctimonious.

Then he adds insult to injury by saying that "a lot of things in life are unfair." What? government intervention into a private financial contract is one of those things in life that is unfair? THAT is his justification for this?

What Richard Green is doing is appropriating the language of the Right. The Right would say that people make their own choices and sometimes they make bad choices. Thusly, it isn't fair that people have to suffer, but life isn't fair.

However, the professor turns it upside down, and suggests that government helping irresponsible people is just fine because, well, life isn't fair.

This kind of stuff drives me up a wall.