Why are people on the right so quick to excuse the banks?

The Future of Capitalism replies:

Well, the road-paving I would leave to private contractors (and perhaps even let them be hired by private operators of toll roads). And I am essentially for open borders, or at least dramatically increased immigration, so I'm not sure that guarding the borders even is a necessary government role. So it's funny that even the two government roles that you assume I favor, I don't. I try to answer some of these questions in the

with Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute, and what I said was that government should enforce laws against theft and fraud and provide a court system in which people can resolve contract disputes. I also say there that the Constitution, with its enumerated powers, gives a pretty good guide to what the federal government should do. A lot of the founding fathers thought standing armies were threats to liberty but I've come around to accepting those. The FDA I think it's pretty well recognized causes a lot of deaths by preventing patients from accessing possibly beneficial experimental drugs, and it certainly hasn't succeeded in keeping dangerous or ineffective drugs off the market. The agency was last seen trying to tell Cheerios what it could say on its cereal cartons. Anti-trust regulation doesn't make much sense to me; if a company is exploiting monopoly power to overcharge consumers for poor quality goods, new entrants will arise. The classic example is the decades-long federal anti-trust case against IBM -- while the government was haggling with IBM's lawyers over its supposed monopoly on the mainframe market, the guys at Microsoft, Apple, and Dell were out essentially making mainframes obsolete. I agree the banks are not blameless on the mortgages, but the government, by backing the mortgages through Fannie and Freddie and the FHA and encouraging home ownership through the home mortgage interest deduction, the exemption from capital gains tax on a lot of home price appreciation, and various HUD programs backed by both parties, was pushing consumers into home ownership just as much as the banks and the real estate brokers were.