STEPHEN MOORE: Wealthy Investors Should Bet Big With Their Own Money Instead

Politicians in Washington have the shortest memories.

Maybe that’s why they so seldom learn from their mistakes, sometimes their catastrophic mistakes.

It was less than 20 years ago that the U.S. economy was flattened by the mortgage and banking crisis.  Does anyone remember?

The experts said the odds were tiny that the housing market could crash; that the federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never need a bailout; that mortgage-backed securities were as good as gold.

Then they crashed overnight spectacularly and devastatingly. Banks made riskier and riskier housing loans to subprime borrowers — and the government covered the bets with essentially 100% loan guarantees. The book “The Big Short” famously tells the story of strippers in Las Vegas playing the market and flipping houses by taking out three or four mortgages.

One reason depositors and investors were paying no attention to the big banks’ high-risk lending strategy is that everything was guaranteed.

By you and me.

Americans are still rightly infuriated by the taxpayer bailouts in the trillions of dollars. The media has swept it all under the rug as an example of the excesses of greed and get-rich-quick capitalism. These factors played a role in the meltdown, for sure, but their partner in crime was the government itself, which insured all the financial Hail Mary passes.

One contributing factor to this moral hazard is deposit insurance. Right now accounts are insured up to $250,000 so that most Americans don’t have to worry about the soundness of the bank where they store their hard-earned savings. We don’t want 1929-style bank runs for sure. So this safety net makes sense for mom-and-pop savers and investors and to shock absorb systemic risks.

But now there is a proposal to raise that taxpayer insured limit to…drum roll, please: $10 million.