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| Author: | Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History |
|---|
July 31, 2008
Bloomberg
July 31 (Bloomberg)—Sometimes television and politics conspire to tell the country the same story. That’s certainly the case this week. The new season of “Mad Men” debuted with another episode chronicling Don Draper’s secret life. The ad man in the cable-TV series knows he’s not supposed to have that many drinks at lunch. He knows he’s living too hard when he smokes Lucky Strikes. He knows he shouldn’t cheat on his wife.
But he does it all anyhow. And he keeps doing it. Why? Because it is just so easy.
In the same hours as 2.1 million people switched on “Mad Men,” President George W. Bush was readying his pen to sign into law a bill he knew he shouldn’t sign—the new housing act. But he did it anyhow.
Why? It was just so easy.
The entire story of the federal involvement in U.S. housing is sort of a “Mad Men” episode of its own. Laws that were passed in the name of preventing crises often encouraged crises.
Consider the starting event in modern housing history, not to mention in the lives of the “Mad Men”—military service. In 1944, the country was enduring a housing crisis of a different magnitude. Tens of thousands of families lived in Quonset huts. Chicagoans were actually buying up trolley cars for homes.
One of Franklin Roosevelt’s last acts on the domestic side was to sign his own enormous housing bill for veterans. The government promised the soldiers in Europe and the Pacific there would be loans to help them buy houses when they got back. The law also protected with federal mortgage guarantees builders who constructed the homes. The idea was to enable vets to stride confidently out their own doors into postwar life.
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