One continues to hear the question "should taxpayers bail out homeowners threatened with foreclosure?" Thus phrased, this is a polemic distortion. Distressed homeowners are also taxpayers, so federal assistance is more correctly understood as the government coming to the aid of a portion of its citizenry in a time of crisis (not unlike the Katrina disaster).
In the spirit of American predatory capitalism, there are numerous individual (not institutional) "investors", fortunate to have escaped the real estate meltdown, ready and willing to take advantage of their fellow citizen taxpayers' misfortune by buying up foreclosed properties at hugely discounted prices. In a just socioeconomic system all such predatory behavior in the pursuit of profit and wealth would be proscribed. However, in 21st century America, where wealth rules, such scavenger-like behavior is condoned and accepted as a manifestation of "the way it is." We can see therein that the sacrosanct free market economy is not founded on moral principle; rather, it is based on the naturalistic fallacy, ie, that "what is is what ought to be." The current "survival-of-the-fittest" economic ethics is an expression of this nation's increasingly plutocratic values.
