The latest "expert analysis" from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan claims that a recession in America is not yet here, but might become a reality in the near future. Like everyone else, he traces the current economic instability back to the housing market that fell apart thanks to the controversial subprime loans: loans to consumers with a low credit value. His defense of these loans is simple: they are not dangerous "in themselves."

When we observe phenomena in society or elsewhere, we cannot simply isolate factors and draw conclusions from those. Nothing exists in a vacuum, especially not in a society where everything is interconnected and interdependent. When services like public transport or electricity break down, we realize this to be a fact.

What Mr. Greenspan is doing here is isolating the subprime loans to a vacuum world and drawing the subsequent conclusion: they're not dangerous. It's a rhetorical trick. Of course a subprime loan in itself is not a threat per se, but what we're looking at here is a consistent phenomenon that includes several factors.

One of them is that these subprime loans were almost exclusively targeting consumers with a very questionable credit history. The idea behind a subprime loan is to offer irresponsible consumers the ability to borrow money for things like houses. The problem here is obviously that this is a risky affair. It also invites for scams where companies force these consumers in debt, which is also what happened in the housing market when subpriming became widespread.

Defending this system by saying that subprime loans are not dangerous "in themselves" is like giving a machine gun to a psychopath and later say that we did nothing "wrong" because a machine gun isn't dangerous "in itself." Greenspan was probably fully aware that this system would never work; any thinking individual would at least be able to draw similar conclusions.

What motivated the idea of offering these loans is the same old modern cliché: the belief that all people are equal and can manage the same tasks, regardless of context. Thanks to subprimes, millions of minorities were able to finance the purchase of their homes. Morally good, we say, but unfortunately not very realistic. The problems started when these consumers realized they couldn't afford to pay the loans in the first place. Ironically, the whole system had become legalized exploitation and was taking the entire economy with it.

This is the brutal truth that we must learn from this: some people are too incompetent to keep track of their own economy. It's questionable whether we even need those people in the first place, but as a solution to our current situation, allocating them to state-owned property and denying them loans larger than they reasonably could repay, would be a sensible way of solving this. Intolerant? Sure, but realizing the destructive effects on the economy this have had, only a pretentious idiot would agree to plunge us all down into a recession, in order to be morally good like Greenspan wanted to be.