What Would George Bailey Think?
Posted by David Zadareky on Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 2:33pm.The best arguments against huge financial institutions are playing out across the streets of America one block at a time.
These institutions have become so large and so bloated with their own power that they don't even know what they own. Who among us, in their right mind, would purchase something as valuable as a $500,000 mortgage and not bother to make sure you had all the required paperwork to complete the sale and prove your ownership of that asset?
It makes me think of the debate between Mr. Potter and George Bailey from the classic movie It's a Wonderful Life. Mr. Potter didn't much care about the individual. Everyone was just an entry in an accounting book. He saw the value of the one institution town – a town that the institution could run to its own benefit.
Why should the institution lend money to people to buy homes when it could make more money renting them homes? As the banking lobby seeks to push through legislation for its own benefit, the issues in It’s a Wonderful Life become more and more relevant.
George Bailey saw the customer as more than an accounting entry. He saw fathers and mothers struggling to make a better life for their family and their children. He wasn't obsessed with making a fatter profit margin on his customers, but rather his focus was on how he could best help them obtain their dreams.
Now there's a lost concept... serving your customers.
Well, if you ask me, there's two lessons to be learned here:
1) As soon as a company becomes labeled as "too big to fail," then the government should immediately step in and break the company up into smaller companies
2) For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
What'd you say just a minute ago? They had to wait and save their money before they even thought of a decent home. Wait? Wait for what?! Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that -- You know how long it takes a workin' man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?
Picture from American Rhetoric
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