I received this in an email from a reader, and I thought I’d share.  Michael Pottorff is a California resident and someone intimately familiar with the real estate industry.  Here’s a good portion of what he has written.

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Congress created the Fed—history now shows that this
group of rocket scientists turned a Recession into our Great Depression

 

Roosevelt campaigned against this intervention, arguing,
“The free market will work if you only give it a chance.” Hoover was cast as
the meddler. Of course, History was soon revised as Roosevelt became a command
and controller on steroids and the suck up press labeled Hoover as a
do-nothing. Roosevelt was revered as a god, just as Obama orchestrated himself
on Mt. Olympus.  And, the results of
Roosevelt’s market manipulation? After nearly 7 years of his Presidency, the
god had more Americans out of work than when he took office. Lend-Lease and
WWII saved Roosevelt, and, unfortunately, his brand of socialism from the US
trash heap.

 

. . .more recently

 

1969—Nixon, the most effective LIBERAL market
interventionist to date, decided like some future rocket scientist that I can
think of, that the inflationary spiral could be nipped in the bud by freezing
wages and prices. As expected, this Soviet modeled government regulation
stagnated the economy. This was my graduating class year, although I did not
post my degree until 1970. I ended up as the proverbial ditch digger, scraping
for work. Scraping for work became the norm—my older friends, complained that
this was the first time they had missed a day of work in 16 years.

 

1974—Congressional regulations, interest ceilings, and a
host of other restrictions made the Real Estate Investment Trusts attractive
(REITs). The proforma models for these projects were created from traditional
unregulated economic data. Soon, these projects were overpriced for a financial
market depressed by regulations. The REITs collapsed and dragged the rest of
the economy down with it. This was the year before my Master’s degree posted.

 

1974—With Nixon ousted, and the economy on its ass, the
United States was now headed by an appointed President, a Congressman! Gerald
Ford. (mercy). Did the government admit that the reason everyone was unemployed
was that their jobs were taxed away from their employers? No!  They decided that we were unskilled and
needed training! I ended up on a crew with 4 other guys—all of us with
journeyman cards/credentials and 3 of us with college degrees—working on a
Municipal Golf course. We were hired because we didn’t need training and
because we had previously performed the work in the private sector at double
the wage. This was just a welfare program for government agencies. The best
public employment program is one that produces private sector jobs. The program
ended and we were left in the same situation, with no additional skills, only
receiving unemployment checks commensurately lower. I got another job (leaving
my education off of my resume) as an equipment operator

 

1980—I began working behind a desk for a small developer.
One of my assignments was to procure money. Jimmy Carter was just ending his
one term Presidency turning in heretofore unheard of concurrent double digit
performances in inflation, unemployment, and interest rates. This was
purportedly economically impossible in an unfettered market. How could this be?
Regulations!

 

To keep the banks from charging too much, Carter (got
Congress to) put a lid on them. They would charge a couple of clicks above what
they would pay depositors.

By putting a limit on what they could charge, they
coincidentally put a limit on what banks could pay depositors. Depositors
figured this out and discovered the money markets. All of the money went there.
Money markets do not make home loans—instant housing crisis!

 

I did my first motel loan before Carter left office–$4.4
million dollars at 16 ½ % with a private money lender (a pension) getting 20%
of the upside—we held a big party. 
Meanwhile, the guy on the street was paying 20% for a VA home loan.  Who did these regulations help?

 

1986 saw me amass the first million dollars that I would
lose 10 years later. During Reagan’s 3rd and 4th years, I
acquired my home, 8 apartments, 2 condos, 5 city lots, and agricultural land
alongside the Colorado River, and, actually made a few dollars. Reagan lost
control of the Senate in 1986 and tax regulations that were relaxed were
reinstated, devaluing Real Estate, impacting sales, construction and related
jobs.

 

1989, or so, saw the collapse of the S & L’s.  Liberals gleefully said, see what happened
because Reagan deregulated the banks. Actually, I remember Ted Kennedy and Alan
Cranston (turns out for personal reasons) pontificating about how we could not
deregulate the guarantees of these banks which needed the full faith and credit
of the United States backing them (translation: the taxpayer was on the hook).
If a private insurer, say Lloyds of London insured the loans, you would be damn
sure that they would be overseeing the underwriting, and, equally sure, that
Ted Kennedy and Alan Cranston never once donned an underwriter’s hat. And, if
the loans went bad, they would be Lloyds’ problem, not the US taxpayers.

 

And so, it came to pass that we had an S & L crises,
more specifically an S & L insurance crisis regulated into a certainty.

 

1991, Bush does not veto the tax bill. Make that, Bush
does not veto the Democrat Congress’s tax bill. Taxes are regulations and
George Bush, in an effort to get along, allowed this bill to pass, opening the
door for a corral-full of attached pork. Money taken from the economy! Thus
began the downward spiral that resulted in my losing my first million. And,
Democrats are still repeating the “read my lips” statement of Bush and blaming
him for the calamity that followed his failure to throw their economic plan in
the trashcan.

 

1996 saw Bill Clinton lose both Houses of Congress—the
body that actually taxes and spends.  The
economy surged. The Democrats and the Liberal Press give Clinton credit, when,
actually, it was the Republican Congress that put a kibosh on the regulations
that was responsible. I had my first six-figure year, the following year, all
dwarfed by the next 7 consecutive years.

 

2006 saw the departure of Alan Greenspan—a regulator,
albeit one with his finger on the pulse of the economy—and the entrance of Ben
Bernanke—a college professor whose grasp of the elements of the economy was as
current as his yellowed lecture notes. For my money, his regulatory
incompetence is what brought the world down. Oh yeah, my second million,
including the roof over my head is getting dragged to hell by this regulatory
pinhead.

 

2008 (September) We need a cash infusion into our banks
to ward off a domino implosion. There is lots of private sector money
available, so what’s the problem?  More
Regulations. It seems that if a big investment house acquires more than a 25%
share of a bank, the banking regulations require them to divest the other 75%.
Get that!!!  The private sector has the
fix, but the regulators—Congress or the people it overseas—have fixed it so it
cannot get into private hands, and remains under the control of Congress, and
the American people get to pay for the mess? Can anyone say “term limits?” Get
these money changers out of the temple!

 

So, please, quit talking about government regulations as
if they are something good. The force behind government is coercion, and, that
is hardly a soul mate of the free-market.

Michael has hope that McCain/Palin will somehow halt the overregulation and government control that is destroying our economy.  He sounds hopeful that McCain will stop acting like a socialist shitbag and start acting like someone who understands the basics of a free market and appreciates hard work enough not to use government force to redistribute it to those who don’t deserve it.

I have no such hope.  Especially not in light of his “outrageous but necessary” pandering for votes.