McArdle writes, at the end of a lengthy explanation of why having judges force writedowns on mortgages is a bad idea (just like, coincidentally, everything else that hurts the bosses):
It’s not that I feel sorry for the bankers, who, like their riskier borrowers, thought that they had found a simple formula for making money without working. Nor am I particularly worried about a policy that cuts into their greens fees. But I do not like complicated policies designed to disguise the costs of something. If you want to take money from banks, levy a tax on banks. If you want to bail out homeowners, put it in the budget. We will not get through this crisis by moving the massive losses in the housing market around to different balance sheets so that the numbers don’t look so scary big. It’s time to man up and take a true accounting.
And this is what I mean when I say libertarians and “reasonable conservatives” never offer a workable policy when it comes to helping the poor or saving the planet. It may well be that the most efficient option is McArdle’s preferred outcome, as is often the case. And I would even be open to taking her offer seriously if she spent real time advocating for it. But she never does. Just as her preferred methods of helping the poor never actually come up except when it comes time to explain why the methods on the table aren’t worth trying, we can be fairly sure we’ll never hear her suggest it’s time to tax the bankers or write big checks to homeowners until someone else suggests a policy that might actually make it through the senate.
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