. . .we wouldn’t be having this financial meltdown! Washington Post columnist Ross Douthat puts the blames our current financial meltdown on George Bailey, of Frank Capra’s masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life:
Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey was actually a pretty savvy businessman. And it’s even easier to forget the precise nature of his business: putting the downscale families of Bedford Falls into homes they couldn’t quite afford to buy.
This is the substance of the great war between Bailey and Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter, the richest, meanest man in Bedford Falls. Potter is against easy credit and the suburban dream, against the rabble moving out of his tenements and buying homes, while the Bailey Building and Loan exists to make suburbia possible.
The Bailey vision is economic and moral all at once. In a mid-movie peroration, the hero lectures Potter and a gaggle of local entrepreneurs on the virtues of democratizing homeownership: “You’re all businessmen here,” he presses them, sounding for all the world like a politician defending Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac against their critics in 2004 or so. “Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers? . . . What’d you say a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait? . . . Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars?”
In the movie, George Bailey has God on his side, but a real-life Bailey would have had Uncle Sam. “It’s a Wonderful Life” debuted in 1946, more than a decade after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Housing Act kicked off a half-century of federal policymaking aimed at making it dramatically easier for working-class Americans to buy and keep their homes.
It’s true that the same lenders people are condemning as “predatory” were praised not long ago for devising ways to allow lower-income people to buy their own homes. Douthat does say that George Bailey’s goal was an admirable one and worth making possible, but still, such well-intentioned schemes helped bring down the economy.
13 comments ↓
On the local, small town scale, George Bailey economics are actually a thing of beauty to behold, no?
And it is way different from the gov’t mandating him to do that.
Does anyone know why this film has ususally been promoted around the holidays? I never did get the connection. Thanks!
CRB, the movie plot occurs on Christmas Eve and contains several Christmas preparation theme scenes. What about that connection is not apparent?
Actually, the government did to a degree mandate Bailey’s involvement; Fed policy was relentlessly inflationary and easy credit, and they set, even at that time, rules for the banks.
One of the unintended consequences of the good intentions to getting low-income people to buy houses through easy credit is that home prices increased much faster than inflation. So much for trying to make housing more affordable.
TK
I must be getting old, or else was confused about which
film this was. Thanks!
George Bailey was a good (literary) example, as noted above, on the local scale. The laws which God gave Moses regarding not moving an ancient boundary stone, and the laws of the Sabbath Year and Jubilee, would keep such a thing from bankrupting the country, but that is considered too radical by many.
The way things -were- done (with so many kickbacks to the hard left) inevitably caused destruction.
Whatever George Bailey’s foibles, they won’t be fixed by giving Mr. Potter $700 million.
You know what? I don’t even like “It’s a Wonderful Life” much. It’s supposed to prove to me that the world would be a worse place without me. All it proves to me is that the world would be a worse place without George Bailey.
So, Lars, when are you going to write some Lutheran Christmas/Christkind stories? We could use them.
I don’t know. I’m still waiting for 3 ghosts to come and set me straight.
Lars,
Just put yourself in his place. Think of the people you’ve touched. You wouldn’t have touched them if you never existed. I don’t think the movie’s saying anything about the world being worse without you. It’s saying you have an effect on it. If you happen to be a family-and-friends type, like George Bailey, you have probably affected those around you in a generally positive way. In which case, one could say about you, the world is better for him having been in it.
Could just be my bias, though. I LOVE the film.
Were the George Bailey’s really trying to encourage this type of lending? Weren’t they still into the responsible lending thing? Which is to say, they were lending an appropriate amount of money which a responsible working person could pay off in a reasonable amount of time. Yes, it was credit. But I think the portion of the monologue quoted left out one of the most important points. I don’t remember it exactly, but it was something about “Wait for what? Until they’re so old and broken down…” and he trails off, then goes in another direction. I think. But the point is, with the price of everything going up - and that’s not the fault of the man or woman who wants to buy a house for his/her family - it’s taking LONGER for people to save, to the point where they get too old to enjoy what they’ve worked toward. I think it was a kind of desperate moment, a change in the way daily life was lived.
At the same time, I think it did lead to this crisis, in a way. It was the establishment’s way to keep control of those who could, if they wanted, just get up and walk away from this whole stupid experiment. Those in power can only have power if someone GIVES it to them…
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