Apparently this isn’t a joke.  You’ve really got to read it to believe it.

FARGO— Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Tim Mathern said Tuesday that the nation’s ongoing financial crisis is the clearest evidence yet that too much privatization has led to regular people getting hurt.

“We need to make sure that people’s hard-earned money is not subject to privatization schemes that are blowing up all around us,” Mathern said. “We are a strong state and we will recover from the current meltdown, but we have to make sure that something like this never happens again.”

He gave the example of Gov. John Hoeven’s support of a proposal to allow state workers to move their state government pensions into a defined contribution plan. Participants of such a plan are not guaranteed any retirement income from the plan. They can only retire if the investments they choose pan out.

As governor, Mathern will make sure that state pension funds and other state investments aren’t sacrificed to such privatization schemes. For now, the governor owes North Dakotans a full accounting of any losses to state investments that their tax dollars.

“We can’t risk letting our state investments go the way of our financial markets,” Mathern said.

For the record at the heart of the current financial crisis is the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who combined either owned or guaranteed 50% of the $12 trillion mortgage market in America.  Everything else that’s going on right now stems from that.  Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were GSE’s, or “government sponsored enterprises.” Which is exactly why they failed.

Had these two companies been run like actual private sector businesses, the kind that don’t get hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts from their paid-off friends in Washington DC when they fail, they wouldn’t have been run so shabbily.  Or they would have imploded long ago with a much less significant impact on the overall economy.

As for pensions being invested in the stock market, it’s worth noting that despite all the hysterics the Dow Jones Industrial Average has seen all of $27 in fluctuation since the beginning of this fiasco.

So, aside from spelling his name correctly (and he may now be wishing he hadn’t done that right), Mathern got exactly nothing right with this.