The coming presidential election reminds me of an old joke: A man dies who is despised by everyone in his congregation. A service is held, and the Rabbi asks, “Before we bury this man, has anyone got anything good to say about him?”

There are a few moments of silence, and then a voice comes from the back of the room, “His brother was worse!”

Some background: When Ronald Reagan said that government was the problem and not the solution; it marked the beginning of the age of deregulation.

Deregulation meant the fox was guarding the hen house, and resulted in a series of disasters which began with the savings and loan scandal and ended with derivatives and credit default swaps which, if not for government intervention, would have brought the flow of credit, and thus commerce, to a standstill.

An example of a derivative (meaning its worth is derived from something else) is a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. A CDO could be a bundle of mortgages, some being subprime mortgages, that would be divided up into tranches (the French word for trenches).

Perhaps one of the tranches would have mortgages held by people with good credit scores, and there might be 14 other tranches, each more risky. The risky tranches are cheaper, because they are more likely to fail.

One problem turned out to be that if a relatively small number of loans went into default, the entire CDO was junk.

It gets worse. You could bet deals would fail (called going short) by buying a kind of insurance called a credit default swap.

Companies who issued the “policies” did not have the capital to cover the losses  and when tons of deals went bad, as they did in 2008, collapse was imminent.

Enter the U.S. government to save the day. The powerful financial sector had opened the door to this debacle by erasing any meaningful restraint on the gluttony of the greedy. What all this means is that we got screwed.

Enter Romney, like the neighbor across the hall from the Jack Nicholson character in the movie “ As Good as it Gets: selling “crazy.”

Romney asserts that business will create the jobs to put the middle class back to work (maybe he is going to hire all the unemployed at Bain Capital), and carping away at “big government.”

That myth never gets old, and the beauty of myths, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, is that you can have an opinion without thinking or reading a book. So, bad as Obama is, and that is pretty bad, I think Romney is worse.

The main point that I want to make, is that the issue of “big government” or “bad corporation,” is, a misdirection play: The blockers all move to the right, but when the running back gets the hand-off, he goes left.

The real issue is that no person, group or organization should be able to function under the cover of darkness, with no oversight and no “checks and balances.”  

Human nature is such that even the best and most well-intentioned among us need limits.

Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.

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Written by: Nelson Strasser

Published: 06 May 2012