Huckabee: Financial Meltdown is a "Moral Crisis"

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee kicked off the 2010 Values Voter Summit with a speech targeting Wall Street "greed".

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee kicked off the 2010 Values Voter Summit with a mixed message, arguing both that government shouldn’t interfere with American families and that government should have done more to prevent the unmitigated, unregulated greed on Wall Street which he claims caused the financial meltdown.

Mike Huckabee gave the first speech of a two-day summit in Washington, D.C. hosted by the Family Research Council, and wasted no time in excoriating President Obama for treating the White House as an “ivory tower” and the United States as a “classroom experiment.”

Huckabee’s first target was Wall Street greed, and in his speech he seemed to come out against even the concept of stocks and investments:

The meltdown of Wall Street was not a money crisis, it was a moral crisis. It was a crisis of unmitigated greed. Instead of investing in the tangible world of goods and services, people could bet on what the worth of a good or service might be out there in the future… they essentially turned Wall Street into a massive financial casino.

But the problem was not only greed, Huckabee argued, but also that the American taxpayer was held accountable for the missteps of Wall Street investors:

In Las Vegas… you don’t pay your own debt, you get your own legs broken. The way we run the financial institutions of Wall Street with government bailouts, if they lose, you the taxpayer pays for it, and the government breaks your legs to make it happen.

Further, the former Republican presidential candidate added that individuals are not suffering because of a fiscal crisis, but a family crisis. “God never intended government to raise our kids!” said Huckabee to widespread applause.

Pointing to new census data that shows one out of every seven Americans are living in poverty, Huckabee pointed a finger at the breakdown of the family structure:

The real reason that we have poverty is that we have a breakdown in the family structure… there is a direct correlation between the integrity of families and the security of families, and the stability of our economy.

Huckabee also took an implicit swipe at fellow 2008 presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s decision to enact Romneycare in Massachusetts. “In Massachusetts, they passed a plan that now has resulted in the highest premiums in the country, while at the same time providing for fifty dollar abortions,” said Huckabee.

Of course, Huckabee also criticized Washington’s out-of-touch culture. It’s “the most disconnected city in all of America,” he said. “This is one place [that] never sees a recession, because they can always vote themselves another appropriation,” said Huckabee. “Not that many people here have ever signed the front of a paycheck, or understood what it means to run a small business.”

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