The press was littered this week with articles based on interviews with the Prime Minister.

Another one that caught my eye was his lamenting of the fact that his party's so called "Mortgage Relief Plan" has not "helped" one mortgagee in distress. Read the article here…

So an election campaign that started out promising to help get some 4,000 mortgages out of default, that was amended and expectations were dropped to helping 1,100, the net result is help for none.

And believe it or not, this is a good thing. The government cannot displace personal responsibility through "plans" like this.

Oh sure, they can create dependency that destroys initiative.

As one Bahamian banker remarked about a year ago:

"They are at best duplicitous. And they keep the people, their followers in particular, “in the dark” rather than lift them up by putting them first…..we must decide what we want to be.

"Their mortgage proposal amounts to a massive bailout that would create significant debt levels for us ….the debt that they are up in arms about. ….it’s a real socialist agenda creating a “welfare state and never allowing us to take responsibility for ourselves……

"Next the state will have to buy people food, and pay for transportation….

So now Mr. Christie promises to get "personally involved" in this scheme, "to see what can be done".

The Bahamas needs economic growth to help those in financial distress not a welfare state.

As Dr. Robert Higgs noted in this article…

"To continue on the road we … have traveled … … is ultimately to deliver ourselves completely into the hands of an unlimited government. It will not matter if democratic processes lead us to this destination. … the making of the welfare state has been from the very beginning a matter of corrupt vote-buying and patronage-dispensing by politicians — democracy in action."