BuckeyeBlog

…and they seek to punish both.

One thing you can always count on in politics is the consistency of the left to make the market the bad guy.  This theme appears to run throughout soon-to-be-introduced House Bill 3, which had it’s first hearing today – even though there was NO bill.  The actual language should be available for public consumption later this week or early next.

A hand-picked group of three interested parties spoke to the committee members about their perspectives of the proposal.  The group consisted of one liaison for the lenders and two advocates for people facing foreclosure.  Who was missing?

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The Ohio House Committee on Housing and Urban Revitalization held a hearing today on HB 3, a bill to “address the current mortgage foreclosure crisis.”  From what we’ve been able to learn (the bill is still in ‘placeholder’ form), the sponsors would effectively ‘nationalize’ in Ohio the private contract between a home loan borrower and lender, even if the Feds were to pass on this. 

We expect the bill to include a mortgage payment moratorium as well as ’cramdown’ provisions where state judges would be given the power to rewrite mortgage provisions. Together these provisions would change the relative situation of debtor and creditor originally established by contract.  By violating the sanctity of the voluntary private contract that structures the utilization of private property in free market economies, these moratoriums and cramdowns would compel creditors to give up value of their private property for political ends. 

Remember: Socialism is a centrally planned economy in which the government controls all means of production.  By aquiring control over the contracts that utilize private property, goverment is aquiring control of a means of production and subjecting it to the central planning of politics and politicians.  If HB 3 were to become law with these provisions, it would be a step toward socialism in Ohio.

For more on the mortgage foreclosure issue see our new policy brief by Marc Kilmer.  Marc shows how the proposal not only takes a sledgehammer to one of the central tenets of economic freedom in Ohio, is at the same time unconstitutional, redistributes wealth and opportunity from those who pay their mortgages to those who don’t, and is simply the wrong solution for the wrong problem.