It's the morality, stupid!

In Atlas Shrugged, the country's leaders sought to treat worsening conditions as a purely economic matter that could be kept completely separated from morality. Their motive was to protect their morality, or at least to protect themselves from having to admit the truth about their morality.

The current economic crisis parallels this. Washington's leaders are doing everything they can to evade the moral roots of their failed economic policies, desperately striving to evade the fact that once they have destroyed the economy in order to protect the status of the poor as an object of sacrifice - so that they can purchase homes they can't afford - there will be no more homes to purchase and we will ALL be poor.

As culpable as the Left is, the role played by the Right in creating this situation is worse: it is the Right which posed as the defenders of freedom - including property rights - while pursuing a policy of "compassionate conservatism" based on religious dogmatism. While the Left openly pursued socialism, it is the Right which sought to have its cake and eat it, too.

The time has come to strip away the "economic" facade and expose the truth that this crisis is a failure of altruism, and as such, there will certainly be more to come until this country's leaders learn to reject sacrifice and accept more rational policies based on a morality of self-interest.