Financial collapse result of policies that rewarded greed

Editor,

Dixon Duval's guest column in Monday's Daily Lobo contains a couple of misleading statements.

First is his intimation that we can now shift the blame for our wallowing economy from President Bush to President Obama. While he slips in a statement that the "disappearance of wealth cannot be blamed only on the previous administration," suggesting shared blame, the remainder of his statements lay the fault solely on Obama. Let's be clear: The Dow Jones average lost most of its value in October 2008, during Bush's term. It went from well over the 10,000-point mark to below 9,000 in a week's time. The values further eroded into late November, dipping nearly 1,500 more points. In other words, this index lost approximately 35 percent of its value before Obama ever took office. Obama inherited this mess, a financial collapse of global proportions. He cannot be asked to fix it in less than three months' time. Moreover, Obama has followed the advice of a vast majority of economists, both conservative and liberal. Are all those people wrong, too?

The other statement Duval makes is that the economy is not "a zero-sum game," stating that the richer man's income is not extracted from the poorer man. Clearly, it is. When the poorer man's labor is devalued by those who have wealth and set wages, the richer man is extracting a balance of labor for nothing and profiting from it. That inequity diminishes the power of the markets - the holy temple of fiscal conservatives - because the people who must by necessity shop in that market have less to spend in it. Everyone loses when a few people hoard the majority of wealth. Economies are not zero-sum games. Neither are they manufacturers of wealth on demand. If that were true, there would be no poor people or rich people and markets would never collapse.

The fault of our weakened economy rests not on one or two presidents, but on the unmitigated greed that was not only left to drive the markets, but was even rewarded by the economic policies that have been in place for the past 30 years.

Terry Davis

UNM staff