Uncle Sam, Your Mortgage Banker

Here's Alan Greenspan's plan to deal with Fannie and Freddie (courtesy of the WSJ):

1. Nationalize them.
2. "Reconstitute them" with taxpayer dough.
3. Split them into five or 10 individual units.
4. Auction them off.
5. Shovel the affordable housing programs into GNMA.

Greenspan's bottom line: "By the time we have the next mortgage crisis, the five or 10 individual companies would have diversified into other areas of finance, and maybe one or two of them would fail. But having been significantly downsized, systemic risk would be avoided."

My bottom line: I certainly can imagine an Obama White House and a Pelosi Congress nationalizing the GSEs but then keeping them. They want us to depend on Uncle Sam for our education, retirement income, and healthcare. Why not our mortgages?