THE ISSUE: How lending standards were lowered, leading to the subprime-mortgage crisis.

Stan Liebowitz writes that the racial and class politics of equality required lenders to loosen standards for mortgages, which ultimately led to the bad loans now threatening the economy (“The Real Scandal,” PostOpinion, Feb. 5).

The French aristocrat and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville was obsessed with democracy destroying liberty.

He warned us 160 years ago: “Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality.”

My guess is that one could easily get a degree in humanities at any major university and never hear the word “Tocqueville.”

Ken Nelson
Mechanicsburg, Pa.

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As a private investigator, it is my experience that many of the participants in the mortgage-lending process – including the borrower, lender, agent, realtor, property assessor and attorneys – were complicit and fully knowledgeable that these loans were nothing but a crap-shoot with the odds heavily favoring default.

As Liebowitz notes, “These policies will have done a disservice to their putative beneficiaries if . . . they are dispossessed from their homes,” which, most often, they were.

People got what they wanted, from those pushing for more lending to low-income individuals, to members of Congress who straightened out the “red-lining” banking industry.

Fees and bonuses were collected, and low-income families got their homes, at least for a while. But the American public got a seriously troubled economy.

Robert X. McInerney
Lakewood, NJ

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Thank you, Stan Liebowitz.

I’ve been waiting for someone with a memory to comment on the mortgage mess.

What happened to the old wisdom of only spending one quarter of one’s income on housing costs?

Admittedly, that rule probably became impossible some years ago, with the rise in housing costs, but how about one half or less?

What happened to “caveat emptor”?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the TV shows like “Flip This House.” I wonder how many of the current foreclosures are actually on houses bought as investments by ordinary people, lured by easy profit, rather than as actual primary residences.

While I confess to being an old curmudgeon, I’ve seen many booms and busts in many markets. Many of the booms have been acclaimed by those “usual suspects” who later deplored them and blamed someone else when they became busts.

Jon Murphy
Englishtown, NJ