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Aug. 31, 2007 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
August 31, 2007, Friday, Hour #3
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Well, two hours in the can, as El Rushbo would say.
And we're all, we all have a great debt of gratitude to the king, the king of all radio, Rush Limbaugh.
He's wrapping up his vacation.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush today.
He'll be back, by the way, on Tuesday.
Rush is great return on Tuesday.
Best of Rush on Monday.
You don't want to miss that.
Those are always great shows.
In the meantime, one more hour to go at 1-800-282-2882 Open Line Friday.
As I told you earlier, I'm going for this jog in Central Park this morning.
And after I woke up my relatives, I'm noticing, you know, everybody's focused on this whole Larry Craig scandal and all of these supposed super secret signs they've got in these public restrooms.
You know, tapping of the foot here and a hand signal there, so the story goes.
Why can't we just be more like the animal kingdom?
I mean, there leaves no doubt.
There's no pretense.
There's no subtlety when you've got Fido going up to another dog, you know, putting his nose in somebody's rear and saying, huh, come on over here by the tree.
That's right there down the middle.
There's no.
Of course, maybe we're starting to behave like dogs, and that could be part of the problem.
As I say, I am Jason Lewis from the great state of Minnesota.
I broadcast a PM Drive show up there on FM News Talk, K-T-L-K.
It's been a great honor to be in for Rush the last couple of days.
And these guys here have been fabulous, Mike and HR, and Snerdy.
So my thanks to all of them.
Before even the last hour is up.
How's that?
Just in case I forget.
Got to talk a little bit about the mortgage situation because, well, let's go to Katrina first, because believe it or not, they are tied into one another.
You know, the great thing about John Edwards is Mr. Two Americas.
He's talking about poverty and he's talking about foreclosures.
Come to find out, he's invested millions in a company that's foreclosing on people after Katrina.
Chutzpah, I guess.
John Edwards took his campaign cue from Groucho Marx.
Sincerity.
If you can fake that, you got it made.
I mean, that's exactly what he's, it's kind of like Clinton.
See, folks, I got to explain this.
It's an oxymoron to try to fake sincerity.
That's why.
Never mind.
So down in Louisiana, the governor of Louisiana, Governor Kathleen Blanco, apparently was taking the witness stand this week over a nursing home or in the St. Rita's nursing home trial.
And she said, I did everything I could to sound the alarm as Hurricane Katrina bore down on Southeast Louisiana.
Oh, really?
Yeah, you and the mayor of New Orleans.
What are those school buses doing here?
Nevertheless, she said, I did everything I could, but in the final analysis, it's up to the individual.
Ultimately, they must rely on, quote, individual responsibility to heed the warnings, close quote.
Well, now you tell us, Kathleen.
I mean, where are the liberals on personal responsibility?
They're all for personal responsibility when they're the governor.
But when it's a Republican, we need a compassionate view towards these people.
The market fails.
We just must have a larger safety net.
By the way, some interesting facts.
If you think government can bail out a city, we have spent, get this, $127 billion, including tax relief, on the post-Katrina New Orleans cleanup effort.
$127 billion.
You want to know how much that is?
The entire domestic product of Louisiana, the GDP of the state, is $141 billion.
So we spent, we doubled the GDP, who says there's no such thing as a free lunch.
In the meantime, the GAO has reported that at least $1 billion of wasted aid has already been accounted for, at least $1 billion.
And since Katrina, New Orleans has become the murder capital of the world, 40% higher murder rate than before Katrina.
Looks like the money's working.
1-800-282-2882, that's in the news.
And, you know, speaking of personal responsibility, could I just get this off my chest?
There has been this great push since the so-called foreclosure crisis.
And I got to be honest with you.
I know this is the epicenter of the financial world here in New York.
In fact, on top of the EIB building in Midtown, that is the epicenter of the financial world.
The Rush Lumbaugh program makes the world go round.
But the mortgage crisis is not a crisis.
Ben Stein wrote about this a couple of weeks back.
The total mortgage market in the United States is about $10.4 trillion.
Of that, about 13% of it is subprime.
That's when you don't get the good rates because you're a credit risk.
I don't mean to be too harsh, but that's fundamentally it.
Of that, only 14% is delinquent.
Of that amount, only 5% is in foreclosure.
And of that, half will be recovered through foreclosure efforts.
You know, they'll take back the house and they'll sell it for something.
So you're looking at $34 billion lost out of $10.4 trillion in the total mortgage market.
Now, I know that Bear Stearns and a couple of these people who are marketing CDOs, these collateralized debt obligations, which package the mortgages and sell them, they're going to take a hit.
Guess what?
That's how markets work.
They should take a hit.
And some of you, here's a news flash.
If you got in over your head, it wasn't due to the mortgage broker lying to you.
I hate to break this to you.
You know exactly when they tell you what your payment's going to be, and they do tell you about balloon payments.
These contracts are hard to read.
Nobody's going to go in and buy a house and say, okay, here's my payment for this year, next year.
By the way, I don't care what it's going to be in five or six years, so don't even tell me that.
Of course, you know that.
They'll tell you it's a balloon payment.
But once again, personal responsibility is being jettisoned for blaming the mortgage market.
And this is the same market, by the way.
How many times were they told, you better lend to some of these urban areas, some of these poorer areas, or we will sue you for what?
Redlining.
We need affordable housing funds.
The radical left-wing welfare rights group Acorn is out there saying, we want more affordable housing in Barney Frank's Fannie Mae bailout.
We want more affordable housing.
So we get affordable housing.
We sue mortgage brokers for denying mortgages.
So then they give more high-risk mortgages, and lo and behold, we get foreclosures.
And who do we blame?
The mortgage brokers, the mortgage industry, the secondary lenders.
You really want to know what the crisis here is, and that is, well, government's implicit insurance.
Freddie Mac profit cut in half, fell by nearly half in part because they set aside more money for the foreclosures, the defaults, and that sort of thing.
You know, this is like another SNL waiting to happen.
There's an implicit federal government guarantee for Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae.
Don't worry, if they package all these mortgages in the secondary market, providing liquidity to the mortgage market, if they go under, they bite off more than they can chew.
We'll bail them out.
That's how Freddie Mac can get lower interest rates.
When they borrow money from me, they can get lower interest rates because I know that the government's going to bail out my investments.
If I buy something from Freddie Mac as an investor or Fannie Mae, I'll take a little lower interest because it's got an implicit government guarantee.
And that lower interest trickles down through the market to make mortgage rates lower than they otherwise would be without this intervention.
And Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are ripe for a real problem because if interest rates go up, the portfolio of mortgages they have, you know, the inverse relationship between interest rates and bonds.
Interest rates go up, bond price goes down.
All of a sudden, their portfolio is below their capital requirements, or it could happen, and they need a bailout.
But if interest rates go down, people refinance their mortgages.
So Fannie Mae has given me 5% a year to invest in them.
They bought a 6% mortgage.
They're living on the spread, but the interest rates go down.
Everybody refinances at 4%.
All of a sudden, they're losing.
And we're guaranteeing all of this.
There's your problem in the mortgage market.
It has nothing to do with letting a few people foreclose and letting some people on Wall Street take their hits.
That's how things are corrected.
Well, it's getting a little bit worse.
Unfortunately, the administration is now suggesting that the FHA, you ever heard of HUD homes?
Remember those homes that are vacant because somebody got an FHA loan and they left town?
They skipped town.
But enough about Hillary Clinton's fundraisers.
The FHA is now going in to ensure that the administration's policies take hold, some of these riskier mortgages.
Now, the administration is proposing to change the FHA mortgage insurance program to allow more people to refinance with FHA insurance.
People who have missed mortgage payments are now ineligible for FHA insurance, but they might be eligible if this plan goes into effect.
That puts taxpayers on the hook.
You know, we've got to quit inducing these moral hazards.
You know, when the government induces a moral hazard, they get more irresponsible behavior.
And we do it all the time with disaster relief after every drought, after every flood.
Why buy federally subsidized insurance when I know the government's going to bail me out?
So you don't do it.
And we did it at Katrina.
We're doing it here.
I'm not suggesting no aid, but what I am suggesting is you can, well, let me put it to you this way.
There's a reason your insurance has a co-payment and a deductible.
There's a reason your homeowner's insurance, your home isn't valued for more than your house is worth.
Otherwise, there tends to be a rise in fires.
There tends to be a rise in home destruction because people can get more.
So they want some pain so that you behave in the proper way.
So the insurance company isn't inducing the moral hazard and taking on a bad risk.
You know, the insurance industry is a great regulator of behavior if we would just let it.
Anyway, that's it for this hour.
Let's move on to your calls when we come back.
1-800-282-2882.
Lots of things to talk about today.
It's Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
I'm Jason Lewis filling in for the big guy, El Rushbo, behind the golden EIB Mike in the Attila the Hunt chair.
What a treat.
This has been Rush.
We'll be back on Tuesday, as I say.
Best of Rush on Monday, right now down on beautiful Las Cruces, New Mexico, right east of Truth or Consequences, I believe.
It's Terry on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Jason, it's great to be with you.
You know, this is my first time call.
I've tried to get through many times, and I just get the busy signal for years.
Well, flattery will get you nowhere.
You know, the issue that I wanted to point out is: yes, personal responsibility, absolutely.
People, you would think that these people were, you know, everybody's educated that they could read and learn and know what's in the contract.
However, I think that a huge issue is people have not been taught personal responsibility.
They have not been taught personal responsibility.
Who are we going to learn that from?
The federal government is on deficit.
The market.
The credit card, the credit card applications, they encourage people to incur more debt than they can service.
Well, I'm from, let me tell you something.
No, no, no, absolutely not.
Why would the mortgage company or the credit card company want to have deadbeats for clients?
Well, the issue, I think that what they do is they put people in these items that they cannot afford to earn to earn the interest.
The secondary mortgage market or the secondary lenders to the mortgage market were already clamping down on some of the more, shall we say, creative mortgages.
The market was handling it.
And if I'm going to assume somebody initiates a mortgage, they don't keep it.
They sell it off into the secondary market for somebody to service the mortgage.
Those people don't want bad loans.
They are going to be much greater regulators of that behavior than the government ever could be.
Witnessed the SNL fiasco when the regulators were no match for the Keating 5.
The market will handle all of the excesses if we let it.
Well, I do not necessarily disagree with you, but my point is, is the, let's just say, financial prudence has not been modeled.
Debt is encouraged.
I'm personally, other than our house, we have no debt, and we will have that liquidated in four years.
Wait a minute.
Why do you have debt on your hands?
There's nothing wrong with debt as long as you use it for an asset that builds in value, as long as you get a return on debt.
Problem with government debt is that it's done for redistribution.
It's done for income transfer payments, and there's no return to society.
But when a company borrows, when you borrow for your house and the value goes up or you're spreading out the payments, there's nothing wrong with that sort of debt.
Now, obviously, there are limits, but in general, debt is good.
Well, now, I do not necessarily disagree with you that buying an asset that appreciates in value is not, that is, that it's bad.
However, I think that a huge issue is people go out and they buy more house than they can service.
What we have is a contentment issue that people are not content with their certain station in life.
Or you've got people speculating on condos down on Miami Beach or someplace.
But the market is correcting.
Let it correct.
What happens is, look, some of this wouldn't have happened had we not had a government push to make mortgages more available for everybody.
It's called affordable housing.
Now, there's nothing wrong with telling people you need to rent a little longer until you can buy a house.
Nothing wrong with that.
But the government intervened.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have really put interest rates lower than they otherwise would be because of the implicit government guarantee that bails out their investors.
All of this is due to government intervention, not the marketplace.
I agree with you.
I think that we need to let the market take over and not be taxing the government.
I mean, not the government using our tax money to supplement the market.
Yeah, you're right.
And there's a couple of good examples with regard to what I'm talking about.
I'll give you, I'm from the Midwest, and we keep rebuilding in flood zones.
Or, you know, farmers don't bother to buy federally subsidized flood insurance because they know what will happen.
Well, the governor's going to declare a disaster area, and then the federal government, FEMA, is going to come in and bail us out.
Why buy insurance?
I get my liberal friends, they always ask me, oh, you fiscal conservatives, you free market types, somebody's dying or bleeding in the street.
You're just going to leave them if they don't have health insurance?
Probably not, but I want them to think I will.
That's the only way to induce responsibility.
Right.
And it boils down to responsibility, personal responsibility and responsibility upon the mortgage lenders to not go out and create a larger market because it's going to be federally subsidized.
That's true.
But that's, again, it's government distorting the market.
Fair points all.
Terry, thanks for calling.
Be well down there in New Mexico.
Go Lobos in Sacramento.
Here's Kim.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hi, how are you?
I'm great.
Excellent.
It's an honor to be on your show.
Well, it's an honor to talk with you.
Well, thank you.
I just called to say, you know, I would love to have my house bailed out.
I was let go with my company.
I won't mention the name.
They reorganized a year and a half ago, and my job was eliminated.
And I still had a mortgage payment, and I've been withdrawing my IRA for a year and a half now and paying better than 25% taxes.
But I'm still doing it.
And I agree with you, we should let the market take care of itself.
If the government's going to bail out one, I want to be there too.
What's so frustrating here is the reason we're in the predicament we're in is due to government intervention.
And therefore, what's the answer by government?
More intervention.
You know, it's amazing how unaccountable market intervention and or liberalism is.
I'll give you an example on the social side.
Sex education.
Has there ever been a greater failure than that?
We were told that sex, Ed, Kim, is going to solve illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease.
So we've had it for 30, 40 years, and everything's worse than it ever was.
So what's the answer?
We need more of it.
I've never seen anything, whether it's intervention in market economics or some of the social agenda.
I've never seen it where failure is a reason to commit more money to something.
Absolutely.
We have a higher pregnancy rate than we've ever had.
Yeah.
For years.
Our illegitimacy rate, right?
Yeah, it's but getting back to the mortgage.
You know, I just did my 06 taxes yesterday, and $38,000 just on IRA taxes.
Wow.
And then those are taxed on top of it.
But I'm doing it.
And I think if we buckle down, everybody does it.
We can figure out a way.
The individual has to do it, not government.
Let the marketplace correct the excesses.
It does it all the time.
Let people be penalized for the error of their ways.
Make actions have consequences, and you'll get responsibility real quick.
Kim, thanks for checking in.
I'm glad you called.
Let's go to Jack in Mount Vernon, Washington.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Open line Friday with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Right, Jason.
Okay.
I wanted to say, and the reason I'm calling is you, actually, I'm calling into reference to some of your comments you made earlier about Frederick Hayek, the government.
And what I'm seeing, I'm seeing a trend.
I'm seeing it in conservative talk radio.
I'm seeing it in Christian radio, talk radio.
And it's a trend to move conservativism into libertarianism.
And I think it's very, very dangerous, and I reject it completely.
It puts freedom above virtue and goodness.
And this is influencing economics, morals legislation.
Here's the news flash.
Hey, Jack, here's a news flash for you, buddy.
Freedom is a virtue.
There is no such thing as virtue without freedom.
Being compassionate with somebody else's money, having the government to say, well, this is good, therefore, this is virtuous, helping your fellow man.
Therefore, we're going to command you to do so.
And if you don't, we're going to put you in jail on April 15th.
There's nothing virtuous about that.
If you don't have choice, which is a prerequisite to freedom, you cannot have virtue.
Look, I don't think we ought to have these people running around talking about I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal.
What we need, friends, are fiscal libertarians and social conservatives.
And that is the new movement.
And we ought to be libertarian when it comes to domestic policy.
It's called free markets and free minds.
And the framers bought into it.
So should we.
You know, it is amazing.
People just don't have faith in the markets.
And the previous caller, I don't disagree with everything he said.
I mean, you know, the old line is from the libertarian crowd that conservatives don't know the difference between a crime and a sin, which I think is true in some cases, but a lot of libertarians don't know the difference between liberty and license.
There's a difference there.
So virtue is the end goal, but the caller doesn't realize you cannot have virtue if you don't have the freedom to choose.
And that demands freedom.
Not to mention the fact that it is in the way we are.
It is, you know, one Supreme Court justice talked, I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes talked about a natural law has that which is observed.
It is in the nature of things.
And in the nature of things, we were born to be free.
We were born free in a lock-in state of nature, and we wouldn't hand over to another human.
Government is another human.
Government is made up of men.
We would never, ever willingly hand over to men the power to oppress us.
Why would anybody in a society that isn't organized all of a sudden create a government?
I think I'll hand this power over to somebody else so they can oppress us.
You wouldn't do that.
That's why government has very narrow and limited roles, primarily to keep us free, to repel illegitimate force.
We give government the monopoly on force, as I said yesterday, to repel illegitimate force.
We don't give government the power of force so that they can say, you be a good person and redistribute your wealth to this guy.
You don't need government for charity.
Organize your charity and do it.
That's one of the things about liberalism that always cracks me up.
We've got to help people.
We've got to solve the deficit.
We've got to do this.
And by God, I'm not going to give them a dime until you do, but by raising your taxes.
Well, wait a minute.
What are you waiting for me for?
If these are such great causes, contribute.
Write a check to the treasury.
Form your charity.
No, they won't do that unless they can get your money.
Why?
That's not virtue, friends.
That's socialism.
That's tyranny.
That's oppression.
Don't ever.
I'm tired of these people running around saying they're fiscal conservatives, usually they're not, and they're social liberals.
What the conservative movement needs is fiscal libertarians and social conservatives.
That's really going to be the foundation of the next great political cause.
So I think.
Anyway, Jason Lewis in for the Great One Rush Lumball.
He'll be back on Tuesday, best of Rush on Monday, Open Line Friday today at 1-800-282-2882.
Speaking of health insurance, and this I don't know how it is that we ever succeed at anything given what I call institutional liberalism.
It's amazing.
If we weren't right on the facts on markets and freedom, we wouldn't survive because every institution in society is liberal.
I'm not making mainstream media.
Every poll that's been done since the Kennedy administration has shown every newsman or woman, almost to a T, liberal vote.
I mean, there was a poll of 112 Washington Bureau chiefs a couple of years ago.
92% or 93% of them voted for Clinton in the 1990s.
Mainstream media is liberal.
Academia, hello, ever been to college?
Slightly to the left, you know.
They would make Karl Marx blush, that sort of thing.
So academia is left.
The National Education Association at the primary education's left.
Business is even getting in on the bandwagon.
H.R. was reminding me of this earlier today.
Business would love to bolster their balance sheet by saying, hmm, let's just get rid of those little liabilities called health insurance and pawn them off to the taxpayer, the government.
So you've got these politically correct big businesses, especially the big ones.
Maybe the last bastion is the National Federation of Independent Business.
Those people have to be conservative because they don't get the big government.
They're liberal and the nonprofit community.
What a con game that is.
I know before you start calling, there's a lot of good conservative nonprofits, Jason.
You've got to understand that.
I know, but I'm telling you, the big, big boys of the nonprofit community are all demonstrably leftist.
And frankly, they get tax-exempt status to preach liberalism.
That's what I call institutional liberalism.
You read the media, you go to the schools, you listen to the nonprofits like Acorn and any other group, and you think, God, the world must be liberal.
And the rest of us, the Nixonian silent majority, are going, gee, where do we lose the?
And that's, by the way, part of the problem with the Republicans.
They keep funding their enemies.
Don't fund the NEA.
Not a good idea.
Don't fund PBS.
They're not going to be your friends.
The EPA gives grants to global warming enterprises.
These people are not going to come out and vote Republican.
If you enlarge the apparatus of government, quite frankly, you're not encouraging more conservative votes.
Well, the latest example of this is the American Cancer Society.
They've got, what, a billion dollars a year in revenues.
You contribute to the American Cancer Society?
Why, they're out there trying to find a cure for cancer.
Think again.
They are now planning to devote $15 million in advertising, not to smoking cessation, and that's even questionable, not to figuring out a cure for cancer, but to ensuring a national health insurance program.
Their advertising plan is going to go to the dire consequences of inadequate health coverage.
Now, this is a political message.
By the way, the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Alzheimer's Association, they all applaud the campaign message.
Have you seen those commercials for the S-CHIP program out there?
We've got to insure our kids.
The State Children's Health Insurance Program, by the way, which wasn't even around 11 years ago, but now it's got to expand to $100 billion, so say the Democrats and the media.
Those commercials are being funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation.
Now, does that ring a bell, friends?
Yes, that was the same foundation that underwrote the Hillary Care town meetings a decade ago or more than that now.
Institutional liberalism is everywhere, and all we do is fund it with tax dollars.
I don't understand that as conservatives.
But I got to get to the S-CHIP program.
There's this big push by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, liberals everywhere, the mainstream media, there's no difference, to expand this program that is going to insure more kids.
The State Children's Health Insurance Program, it's vital, even though nobody's denied health care in America, but even though it wasn't around 11 years ago.
Well, the plan by the House would allow S-CHIP subsidies for households 400% above the poverty line.
You could be making $82,600 and still qualify for government-subsidized health insurance.
And children?
It ensures anybody under 25.
In fact, 14 states use their S-CHIP grants to insure adults, some of them, presumably, childless adults.
Why do they call it the State Children's Health Insurance Program?
Because it is a single-payer plan.
It's in the nascent form of a single-payer plan.
It's the beginning of a single-payer plan.
This is the program, by the way, you Rush fans ought to know.
This is the program where they demanded a $10 tax on cigars to fund, 61 cent tax on cigarette increase, and a $10 tax, maximum, of course.
They were feeling generous that day.
$10, we'll limit it to that on a cigar.
Oh, by the way, for about every 100 children that get enrolled in S-CHIPs, about 35 to 50 leave private insurance.
Leave private.
So what we're doing is we're deliberately using a program to take people away from the private insurance market to get them locked into Hillary care.
Do you detect a conspiracy here?
Now, the president, God bless him, has threatened to veto the S-CHIP boondoggle.
You need to support him on that big time.
1-800-282-2882.
We've got time for a call before the next break in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Brittany, you're on the Rush Limbaugh program with Jason Lewis.
Hi.
Hi, thanks for taking my call.
Glad to, Brittany.
I was just calling, I was telling your screener that I'm actually the chairman of the College of Republicans on my campus.
And I was so excited to hear you talk about fiscal libertarians and social conservatives because that's actually what I've been since I was about 13 years old.
I would not come out as a college Republican in Raleigh as long as Mike Nifong is still there.
And who knows what's going to happen?
Well, I mean, he's over at Duke, so we'll let that.
Well, that's not far.
It's in the triangle, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
But we sort of try to stay a little bit distant from the crazies in Chapel Hill and Durham.
We're slightly more conservative.
You're at NC State then.
I am, yes, sir.
Okay.
And but I was just telling you, Screener, that that's exactly what I've seen more and more of.
You know, in my activism as a student leader, I've done a lot of student programs in D.C., and then being the chair of the College Republicans every year, I sort of see that as being more of what's coming into our college campuses.
Our students that are really, really frustrated, and they really are taking sort of a fiscal libertarian, socially conservative stand.
And it makes for a very interesting dynamic on a public university.
It ought to be the Republican dynamic.
And we're all leery of these Republicans that run around and say, well, you know, I'm a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal.
And then they turn out to be a fiscal liberal, too, once you break on one issue.
And so let's change the paradigm here, like you're doing, and say, no, the framers believed in free markets.
That's why they put protections for private property in the Constitution.
I mean, that's why James Madison insisted on a takings clause.
They believed in private property.
They believed, in effect, in capitalism.
So there should be very little intervention in the private markets.
I think that's what Rush believes.
I know that's what Walter Williams believes.
That's what I believe.
That's what you believe.
So that's not a controversial position.
So, yeah, fiscal libertarianism and social conservatism.
Unfortunately, the Constitution isn't exactly taught as the Constitution very often.
You know, even my brother, he's 12 years old.
I mean, he's one of the only kids in his seventh grade class that sort of understands this difference between enumerated powers and rights and convenience or just the whole idea that being offended, you don't have a right to not be offended.
And it's just such an entitlement society, but I think it's really encouraging that more and more I'm experiencing that my generation is getting set up with and that we really want to get back to what back to first principles.
The whole purpose of the First Amendment is precisely to allow you to offend somebody.
You don't need first protection, you know, or First Amendment protection if you're saying something that everybody agrees with.
Yeah, right, exactly.
Hey, Brittany, thanks for the call.
And by the way, I always get a kick out of these people that say, you know, we've got to have these judges who interpret a living breathing, in the words of Lawrence Tribe, a living, breathing Constitution.
Well, if you do that and you tear the Constitution to shreds by doing it, it means nothing.
You ensure that the majority will rule.
They always say in order to protect the minority, we've got to have judges who believe in an activist judiciary, who believe the Constitution is anything they say it is.
Well, if the Constitution is anything the current Supreme Court says it is, the Supreme Court is confirmed by what?
A majority vote in the president and a majority vote by the senators who elect them and who are elected by the majority.
How does that protect the minority?
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday.
Don't go away.
We are back wrapping things up for an Open Line Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Jason Lewis filling in for the great one.
He'll be back on Tuesday, Best of Rush on Monday.
Let's see, a couple more segments here.
Time for a few calls.
Let's go to Carl in California.
You're on the Rush Limbaugh program.
Hi.
Hello.
I'm a first-time caller, but I disagree with you on the free markets.
I wanted to say that there's no such thing as a free market.
That's a misnomer.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Markets are constructed to serve those that construct them.
All one has to do is look at corporations.
Eastern Europe worked out pretty well for you, didn't it?
Well, we got antitrust laws that protect us against.
No, actually, the unions don't have antitrust laws.
Should they be subject to antitrust?
We have the American people, by law, have the Sherman antitrust laws that prevent against monopolies by corporations.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
The only monopoly in the United States of America is called public education.
The only monopoly that has the government sanction that says we will take your money against your will and fund something whether you use it or not is a government sanctioned monopoly.
Let me finish.
Let me finish, Carl, is a government sanctioned monopoly.
Monopolies cannot exist in a free market.
If they raise the price with impunity, other players get in eventually and drive the price down back to the normal rate of profit, which is usually the rate of interest.
That's the way it's worked.
And by the way, I would urge you to go back and read a book by Robert Folsom.
I think the guy's name is Robert.
It's Folsom called The Myth of the Robber Barons.
If you go back at that horrible progressive era, the turn of the century that initiated the Progressive Era, you will find all of those barons, all of those oil monopolies had government advantages.
That's because the government's not operating in a way to stop group boycotting, tying agreements, and allocation of customers.
You've been drinking the Kool-Aid big time.
Hey, Jason, how do you explain the domination of the media?
The media is run by corporate America.
You demonize it as being liberal.
It's a cultural fact that people that go to journalism school are, what do you mean, domination of the media?
Do you have any idea how many media companies there are in America?
How about the insurance company?
Answer my question.
Answer my question.
Oh, yeah, those insurance companies, they get a handout at every state that regulates them.
Everybody wants to tax their profits.
You know, your idea of a tying agreement.
Carl, you're an anti-private property, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom lefty.
You don't trust markets because maybe you haven't done very well.
Sorry about that, pal.
Your argument for a tying arrangement is going into a shoe store and saying, I want one shoe.
Sorry, we only sell them in pairs.
Aha, it's a tying arrangement.
Enough of you, Carl.
I can't take much more of it.
In Buffalo, New York, Dan, you're on Russia's show.
Hi.
Pleasure to be speaking with you, Jason.
My pleasure, sir.
What's your thoughts about President Bush's proposed bailout of the mortgage foreclosures?
With all due respect to the president, I think it's a big mistake.
And why do you think that?
Because inducing the moral hazard and trying to insure something by the federal government is always a recipe for excess.
Does anybody remember the SNL crisis?
What did we do there?
We insured the savings and loans.
No, we insured.
St. Germain in 1980 got a bill authorized to provide federal insurance for SNLs, $100,000 per account.
And therefore, you put your deposit in an SNL, and the executive says, don't worry, I can loan this out.
Risky loan doesn't matter because you've got FSLIC and coverage.
You've got federal government insurance.
And all of a sudden, they had the Keating 5.
You had these bad loans.
And we had to form the Resolution Trust Corporation to bail out the SNLs.
Now, why would you want to do that with any other company or any other industry?
Well, I'm on the side of that most of these loans that are in foreclosure are stated income loans.
They had to state their income higher because they're paying taxes on a much lower reported income to the IRS.
So these individuals are cheating the average taxpayer who does pay their due to the IRS every year.
And now they want the taxpayers of this country to bail them out.
I agree with you.
I agree.
I do not think we should.
I don't think we should.
Look, I think I'm a radical on this.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the implicit price guarantee is a de facto bailout, or maybe.
And the FHA getting in on these bad loans is a mistake.
So, Dan, you and I are in agreement.
I'm up against the clock, though.
I got to move.
I'm Jason Lewis in for Rush Limbaugh on Open Line Friday.
You're on EIB.
Don't go away.
Well, what can I say?
It has been an amazing two days being here in New York.
New York's always great.
It's a great city.
Love to come to Manhattan, love to come to New York.
But filling in for the great one, Rush Limbaugh, has been a real treat for me, Jason Lewis, and I want to thank him publicly for that.
And of course, the guys here have been fabulous.
Mike and HR and Snerdley and everybody here involved at the Rush Limbaugh show have been just absolutely wonderful.
And I could not thank them enough.
It's been a treat.
And hopefully, down the road, we can do it again.
It is, by the way, a great holiday weekend coming up.
So remember, when you're having fun this weekend, thank the Lord you live in a free country.
And it's free, in large part, due to people who have good ideas, like the guy I'm filling in for these last two days.
So with that, I will bid you adieu.
My thanks to everybody here.
My thanks to Rush Limbaugh.
Have a great weekend.
Rush is back on Tuesday, best of Monday.
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