Whinging about the excesses and ridicularity of the government is fun--I do it all the time. But whinging with specific ideas to fix stuff can be rewarding too. If you've got better ideas than the ones I've tossed out above, and I know you do, leave them in the comments section.
3/29/2009
But sir, it's wafer thin
So I was reminded today that a few weeks ago I conducted a little poll here at ECM which asked my three-plus loyal readers to select one or more topics for a future essay. Climate change, nee global warming, came out the surprise winner. Compounding my astonishment at receiving more votes than I have readers, the "control" response concerning a request for instructions at having dropped a pencil received but a single vote. No matter my other preferences among the poll options, I would have voted for that myself. And although more than half the traffic here is generated from Star Wars-themed searches that turn up my recent foray into film criticism, nary a weary traveler selected the More Star Wars option. So go figure.
So climate change has seized the fancy of my several loyal readers, and I myself am somewhat curious as to what I'll uncover (see? objective inquiry without presumption of the outcome!). I've read a bit on the subject but a quick update or refresher on the latest writing on the subject won't hurt. It will likely be early summer before everything comes together and the long-awaited essay appears on the subject, but the waiting and the investment of additional time will make it only more delicious when it appears. And the whole climate change movement isn't likely to go away by then anyway, and if it does, then there's probably no need for me to write about it in the first place.
Besides, for the moment I sense an unexpected weakening of the Leninite BHO agenda in Washington. It's a long way from having been thwarted, and after all a tremendous amount of damage already has been done, but I'm hearing rumbles about slipping poll numbers and reluctance in the Congress to take on cap-and-trade, and that the $650B that was to provide in revenue (and politburo-type economic control) is now expected not to be available, calling into question the possibility of enacting the nakedly vote-buying Making Work Pay tax credit. If a touch of heretofore unsuspected democratic righteousness causes not one but two awful proposed programs to vanish at once, this can only be described as a good thing. But the reluctance to take up cap-and-trade pushes climate change a touch down the list of my priorities for the moment (leaving aside that my opinion of most of the political elements of the climate change movement, leaving aside the actual science, were actually a double-bluff XK-Red-27 technique to impose an otherwise obviously undesirable Bolshevik command-and-control apparatus which would be ultimately no less bloodthirsty than the original for its apparent love of the proletariat).
So for the moment my biggest concern is in matters economic. In that spirit I call attention to today's invaluable essay from Mark Steyn, entitled False Choice. It's wonderful enough to be worth quoting at length:
I think matters have reached a point where the legislative branch of the federal government has become nothing but a bunch of corrupt, unaccountable, self-dealing petty-tyrants-for-life. And I think what we need is a comprehensive framework of ideas--or one big idea--to restore accountability to the people in the manner of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America, which for all its faults mainly delivered on its promises and was ultimately betrayed because of the corrupting power of power itself. The elephants of the middle 'aughts lost their way, their principles, and all sense of restraint or accountability after a decade in power. It's taken the donkey two months to replicate that feat.
The problems with reform are that we trust in a group of men to govern us instead of the system. A favorite accounting aphorism is "let the system be the solution." When everything is ad hoc and the operators exercises maximum control to evaluate treatment of each item before it is recorded, the system inevitably fails because of the fallibility of its operators. When a system of rules, carefully adhered to, governs outcomes instead of individual judgments performed a thousand times over, results are better and more consistent, and errors made systematically are more easily detected and corrected than those which are introduced by hand at each of a million decision junctures.
The relevance here is that the donkey and the elephant have both proven themselves incapable of running a limited government when put in charge of a system which is essentially the rule of men instead of the rule of law (though, to be sure, I think the donkey's errors are more destructive and enervating). It is time we return to a system of the rule of law, not the rule of men, even if a constitutional amendment is required to pry the reins of power from their hands.
Quoth Madison in Federalist 51:
I am assembling my thoughts on this into an essay which will end up taking precedence over the one about climate change. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts as to what one single constitutional amendment would do the most good to permanently restrict the type of behavior emitting from the congress these days.
So climate change has seized the fancy of my several loyal readers, and I myself am somewhat curious as to what I'll uncover (see? objective inquiry without presumption of the outcome!). I've read a bit on the subject but a quick update or refresher on the latest writing on the subject won't hurt. It will likely be early summer before everything comes together and the long-awaited essay appears on the subject, but the waiting and the investment of additional time will make it only more delicious when it appears. And the whole climate change movement isn't likely to go away by then anyway, and if it does, then there's probably no need for me to write about it in the first place.
Besides, for the moment I sense an unexpected weakening of the Leninite BHO agenda in Washington. It's a long way from having been thwarted, and after all a tremendous amount of damage already has been done, but I'm hearing rumbles about slipping poll numbers and reluctance in the Congress to take on cap-and-trade, and that the $650B that was to provide in revenue (and politburo-type economic control) is now expected not to be available, calling into question the possibility of enacting the nakedly vote-buying Making Work Pay tax credit. If a touch of heretofore unsuspected democratic righteousness causes not one but two awful proposed programs to vanish at once, this can only be described as a good thing. But the reluctance to take up cap-and-trade pushes climate change a touch down the list of my priorities for the moment (leaving aside that my opinion of most of the political elements of the climate change movement, leaving aside the actual science, were actually a double-bluff XK-Red-27 technique to impose an otherwise obviously undesirable Bolshevik command-and-control apparatus which would be ultimately no less bloodthirsty than the original for its apparent love of the proletariat).
So for the moment my biggest concern is in matters economic. In that spirit I call attention to today's invaluable essay from Mark Steyn, entitled False Choice. It's wonderful enough to be worth quoting at length:
Writing in the Chicago Tribune last week, President Obama fell back on one of his favorite rhetorical tics: “But I also know,” he wrote, “that we need not choose between a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism and an oppressive government-run economy. That is a false choice that will not serve our people or any people.”As they say, read the whole thing.
Really? For the moment, it’s a “false choice” mainly in the sense that he’s not offering it: “a chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” is not on the menu, which leaves “an oppressive government-run economy” as pretty much the only game in town. How oppressive is yet to be determined: To be sure, the official position remains that only “the richest five percent” will have taxes increased. But you’ll be surprised at the percentage of Americans who wind up in the richest five percent. This year federal government spending will rise to 28.5 per cent of GDP, the highest level ever, with the exception of the peak of the Second World War. The 44th president is proposing to add more to the national debt than the first 43 presidents combined, doubling it in the next six years, and tripling it within the decade. But to talk about it in percentages of this and trillions of that misses the point. It’s not about bookkeeping, it’s about government annexation of the economy, and thus of life: government supervision, government regulation, government control. No matter how small your small business is — plumbing, hairdressing, maple sugaring — the state will be burdening you with more permits, more paperwork, more bureaucracy.
And don’t plan on moving. Ahead of this week’s G20 summit in London, Timothy Geithner, America’s beloved Toxic Asset, called for “global regulation.” “Our hope,” said Toxic Tim, “is that we can work with Europe on a global framework, a global infrastructure which has appropriate global oversight . . . ”
“Global oversight:” Hmm. There’s a phrase to savor.
“We can’t,” he continued, “allow institutions to cherry pick among competing regulators and ship risk to where it faces the lowest standards and weakest constraints . . . ”
Just as a matter of interest, why not? If you don’t want to be subject to the punitive “oversight” of economically illiterate, demagogic legislators-for-life like Barney Frank, why shouldn’t you be “allowed” to move your business to some jurisdiction with a lighter regulatory touch?
[...]
Unfortunately, all of it costs money he doesn’t have. So he has to borrow it, in your name. Where does the world’s hyperpower go to borrow more dough than anyone’s ever borrowed in human history? More to the point, given that, partly at the behest of Obama and Geithner, almost every other western government is ramping up national debt to cover massive bank bailouts and other phony-baloney “stimuli,” is there enough money out there to buy up the debt that’s already been run up? Last week, at the official British Treasury auction, investors failed to buy the full complement of so-called “gilt-edged” 40-year bonds. Two such auctions have already failed in Germany. The U.S. Treasury, facing similar investor reluctance to snap up $34 billion of five-year notes, was forced to increase the interest it will pay on them. The Chinese and the Saudis have long taken the view that it’s to their advantage to own as much of the western world as they can snaffle up, but it’s unclear whether even they have pockets deep enough for what America and the many Bailoutistans of Europe are proposing to spend.
In their first two months, Obama and Geithner have done nothing but vaporize your wealth, and your children’s future. What began as an economic crisis is now principally a political usurpation. And, to return to the president’s “false choice,” that “chaotic and unforgiving capitalism” is exactly what we need right now. It’s the quickest, cheapest, fairest, most-efficient route to economic stabilization and renewal. A regimented and eternally forgiving global command economy with no moral hazard will destroy us all.
I think matters have reached a point where the legislative branch of the federal government has become nothing but a bunch of corrupt, unaccountable, self-dealing petty-tyrants-for-life. And I think what we need is a comprehensive framework of ideas--or one big idea--to restore accountability to the people in the manner of Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract With America, which for all its faults mainly delivered on its promises and was ultimately betrayed because of the corrupting power of power itself. The elephants of the middle 'aughts lost their way, their principles, and all sense of restraint or accountability after a decade in power. It's taken the donkey two months to replicate that feat.
The problems with reform are that we trust in a group of men to govern us instead of the system. A favorite accounting aphorism is "let the system be the solution." When everything is ad hoc and the operators exercises maximum control to evaluate treatment of each item before it is recorded, the system inevitably fails because of the fallibility of its operators. When a system of rules, carefully adhered to, governs outcomes instead of individual judgments performed a thousand times over, results are better and more consistent, and errors made systematically are more easily detected and corrected than those which are introduced by hand at each of a million decision junctures.
The relevance here is that the donkey and the elephant have both proven themselves incapable of running a limited government when put in charge of a system which is essentially the rule of men instead of the rule of law (though, to be sure, I think the donkey's errors are more destructive and enervating). It is time we return to a system of the rule of law, not the rule of men, even if a constitutional amendment is required to pry the reins of power from their hands.
Quoth Madison in Federalist 51:
In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. (Emphasis mine.)It is unfortunate, however unapologetically undemocratic it is to point out, that one of the essential checks on the tyranny of the legislature has been undone by the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which reduced the separation between the houses of the congress by rendering similar their modes of election. Since undoing that seems unlikely and any such plan would in all likelihood be falsely accused of racism by some convenient demagogue, perhaps it is time to consider some of Madison's "still further precautions" against the dangerous encroachments of the outlaw federal congress.
I am assembling my thoughts on this into an essay which will end up taking precedence over the one about climate change. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts as to what one single constitutional amendment would do the most good to permanently restrict the type of behavior emitting from the congress these days.
3/20/2009
3/19/2009
3/17/2009
AIGainst all enemies, foreign and domestic
Does anybody recognize this guy?
There is an interesting and kind of disturbing kerfluffle taking place the past few days over the now-infamous AIG bonuses, evidently paid to some of the worst offenders in the now-taxpayer-owned venture.
I have mixed feelings on the matter: it's of course offensive, unconscionable, etc, to use taxpayer money to pay these sorts of bonuses ($165M paid to 73 people per the Journal); let's get all our moral outrage out of the way up front here. Sure, angry and mortified, check.
But. There are two really big problems here with what the Congress is trying to do, and what BHO is badgering AIG to do, namely to return the money. Let's deal with the smaller of the two first:
Bonuses are funny things in the banking industry. I think banking bonuses are about as hard to stomach as Alex Rodriguez's steroids-inflated salary. I sure don't get that type of bonus as an accountant. But they are kind of like inflation in a way: actual inflation is hard to take, but what really keeps economists and central bankers up at night is the possibility of increasing inflation expectations. When the expectation of inflation takes hold it becomes largely self-sustaining and self-fulfilling--ask Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker. This is why Bernanke spent so much time during last year's excursion into the realm of $147 oil talking insouciantly about "inflation expectations are well anchored," and so forth.
The problem with forcibly curtailing bonuses in the financial industry is that they are expected. They are just as expected (however unjustified) as a $44M contract for a pitcher with a career winning percentage just over .500 (cough Dan Heran). If you single out one company and forbid competitive bonuses, or one baseball team and mandate they not pay salaries competitive with those offered elsewhere, you get a slow-motion self-destruct sequence as talent predictably drifts away and new talent stubbornly refuses to be recruited. Policy has consequences, no matter how much you wish it didn't.
And, having injected $160B of taxpayer money into AIG, it would be kind of preferable not to voluntarily begin a chain reaction which necessarily must eventuate in AIG's certain implosion down the road just because we feel good about tipping that first domino. If we wanted AIG to fail, we had a golden opportunity last year to simply let it fail and allow for an orderly disposal of its assets in a bankruptcy. In a free market economy, we punish mistakes by permitting bankruptcies to happen. In the modern, perilously-close-to-socialist America, the only business mistakes we punish are when executives fail to genuflect quickly enough to avoid the displeasure of the Congress.
Which brings me to the larger point. There is an interesting post from David Freddoso over at the National Review blog, the Corner:
Because, at the insistence of the possibly criminal Chris Dodd, these AIG bonuses are legal. Shallow, greedy, possibly competitively necessary, whatever: they don't appear to have been illegal under a plain reading of the law. To write a law after the fact which criminalizes the bonuses appears to me to plainly run afoul of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which states among other Limitations on Congress, that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." That they may not be quite criminalizing the behavior, only seeking to write a law after the fact which de facto (if not de jure) prohibits the offending behavior and then find a way to apply this prohibition retroactively sounds rather like they have at best perhaps not violated the letter of Article 1, Section 9, while they have in fact willfully and almost gleefully micturated upon its plain spirit and intent. Bravo, gentlemen, and not even 8 weeks into Dear Leader's Reign (I almost said Reign of Terror).
If the Congress is willing to disregard the Constitution (and not for the first time just this year, either) in order to achieve the outcomes it prefers, and in order to select the winners and the losers depending solely on their own judgment (not to say depending on the size of their campaign contributions), we are in danger of having the Constitution itself rendered useless in broad disregard. One might argue the courts essentially supplanted the plain text of the Constitution with their own particular flavor of momentary whimsy years ago, and it's possible that the other two branches are even now racing to catch up.
The government has demonstrated that its chief principle in managing its affairs will be to adopt those positions which maximize its own control over events and the citizens of our fair republic and has done so while evidencing a, shall we say, diminished regard for the rule of law. History, and our mascot for the day at the top of the post, should teach us that this is an unwelcome omen.
I have mixed feelings on the matter: it's of course offensive, unconscionable, etc, to use taxpayer money to pay these sorts of bonuses ($165M paid to 73 people per the Journal); let's get all our moral outrage out of the way up front here. Sure, angry and mortified, check.
But. There are two really big problems here with what the Congress is trying to do, and what BHO is badgering AIG to do, namely to return the money. Let's deal with the smaller of the two first:
Bonuses are funny things in the banking industry. I think banking bonuses are about as hard to stomach as Alex Rodriguez's steroids-inflated salary. I sure don't get that type of bonus as an accountant. But they are kind of like inflation in a way: actual inflation is hard to take, but what really keeps economists and central bankers up at night is the possibility of increasing inflation expectations. When the expectation of inflation takes hold it becomes largely self-sustaining and self-fulfilling--ask Jimmy Carter and Paul Volcker. This is why Bernanke spent so much time during last year's excursion into the realm of $147 oil talking insouciantly about "inflation expectations are well anchored," and so forth.
The problem with forcibly curtailing bonuses in the financial industry is that they are expected. They are just as expected (however unjustified) as a $44M contract for a pitcher with a career winning percentage just over .500 (cough Dan Heran). If you single out one company and forbid competitive bonuses, or one baseball team and mandate they not pay salaries competitive with those offered elsewhere, you get a slow-motion self-destruct sequence as talent predictably drifts away and new talent stubbornly refuses to be recruited. Policy has consequences, no matter how much you wish it didn't.
And, having injected $160B of taxpayer money into AIG, it would be kind of preferable not to voluntarily begin a chain reaction which necessarily must eventuate in AIG's certain implosion down the road just because we feel good about tipping that first domino. If we wanted AIG to fail, we had a golden opportunity last year to simply let it fail and allow for an orderly disposal of its assets in a bankruptcy. In a free market economy, we punish mistakes by permitting bankruptcies to happen. In the modern, perilously-close-to-socialist America, the only business mistakes we punish are when executives fail to genuflect quickly enough to avoid the displeasure of the Congress.
Which brings me to the larger point. There is an interesting post from David Freddoso over at the National Review blog, the Corner:
But why is Obama so outraged and surprised? Today we learn that he signed the very bill that quite clearly made those bonuses legal — the $787 billion stimulus package he had traveled around the nation promoting. The bill includes restrictions on executive compensation, but creates an exception for bonuses contractually obligated before February 11 of this year. The provision, and the exception, were inserted into the bill by the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd (D, Conn.), who has received more than $100,000 from AIG employees in the last 20 years, had written and inserted the relevant provision, with the relevant loophole. How can he, the president, or anyone else who voted for the stimulus, suddenly act surprised? Don't tell us they didn't read the bill.Well, yes. But the difficulty in imagining it doesn't seem to have stopped the Congress from trying (from today's Journal):
House Republicans are already calling for a return of the money, and holding a press conference. Here is the statement from House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R, Va.) from this afternoon.
“Today, news reports reveal that a last minute provision in the stimulus bill inserted by Democrats protected bonuses like those received by AIG executives. Taxpayers deserve better than this from their government, and this is just the latest reason why legislation must be transparent for all Americans to see before it is recklessly signed into law.”
UPDATE: Here is the loophole, from the section of the stimulus package that deals with compensation rules for TARP recipients:
The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.
Frankly, it's hard to imagine how the government could prevent such contracts from being honored. But the presence of this loophole, in black and white, certainly gives the lie to all of this phony outrage — by the senator who created the loophole, by the president who signed it into law, and by everyone else who voted for the stimulus package.
Congress Looks to a Tax to Recoup Bonus MoneySome lawmakers may see it that way. This voter sees it rather differently and this stems from the fact that I see a government's duties as being narrow and limited: provide for common defense, ensure the rule of law and property rights, and provide an architecture in which persons who haven't broken a law can go about their business unmolested, free to pursue economic success or religious fulfilment or a great suntan or whatever makes an individual happy. I fail to find much in the Constitution or the Federalist Papers which suggests government should be involved in managing outcomes like this.
By JONATHAN WEISMAN, NAFTALI BENDAVID and DEBORAH SOLOMON
WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers moved to tax away almost all of the $165 million in bonuses paid to employees of tottering insurance titan American International Group Inc. as Obama administration officials scrambled to assign blame for the payouts.
Legislators, including Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.), proposed to levy a special tax on the so-called retention bonuses paid to 73 people in AIG's Financial Products subsidiary. Recipients of the funds include 11 persons who no longer work at the company. Details of the various tax plans differed, but one idea calls for a tax rate of 90% to 95%, with much of the remainder claimed by state and local levies. Some lawmakers saw the move as an attempt to pressure the employees into giving up their bonuses voluntarily.
Because, at the insistence of the possibly criminal Chris Dodd, these AIG bonuses are legal. Shallow, greedy, possibly competitively necessary, whatever: they don't appear to have been illegal under a plain reading of the law. To write a law after the fact which criminalizes the bonuses appears to me to plainly run afoul of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which states among other Limitations on Congress, that "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." That they may not be quite criminalizing the behavior, only seeking to write a law after the fact which de facto (if not de jure) prohibits the offending behavior and then find a way to apply this prohibition retroactively sounds rather like they have at best perhaps not violated the letter of Article 1, Section 9, while they have in fact willfully and almost gleefully micturated upon its plain spirit and intent. Bravo, gentlemen, and not even 8 weeks into Dear Leader's Reign (I almost said Reign of Terror).
If the Congress is willing to disregard the Constitution (and not for the first time just this year, either) in order to achieve the outcomes it prefers, and in order to select the winners and the losers depending solely on their own judgment (not to say depending on the size of their campaign contributions), we are in danger of having the Constitution itself rendered useless in broad disregard. One might argue the courts essentially supplanted the plain text of the Constitution with their own particular flavor of momentary whimsy years ago, and it's possible that the other two branches are even now racing to catch up.
The government has demonstrated that its chief principle in managing its affairs will be to adopt those positions which maximize its own control over events and the citizens of our fair republic and has done so while evidencing a, shall we say, diminished regard for the rule of law. History, and our mascot for the day at the top of the post, should teach us that this is an unwelcome omen.
3/10/2009
The Most Evil Man in America, week of 3/9/2009
This week let's award our inaugural Most Evil Man in America award to Anna Burger, since we're totally into equality of opportunity here and it would be wrong to disqualify anyone in advance from this prestigious award merely because of her gender. And thus we can comfortably anticipate the many weeks in which Nancy Pelosi will win this coveted award in future.
From today's Journal:
First, and most obviously, it totally disregards the fact that policy has consequences. American lawmaking has been rife with this particular intellectual fatuity for decades now, so this is hardly newly invented by Mrs Burger. But just in this single sentence, she has called for three policies which would have entirely predictable unintended consequences:
"allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage loan terms"
This is a favorite of the left these days, and finds much favor with probable future MEMA award winners such as Chris Dodd and the evil Barney Frank. It's much like the rest of their thinking on banking and mortgage policy in general, dating at least to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The idea then was that these independent for-profit banks were behaving in a manner deemed unsalutary by certain aggrieved donkeys, in this case by a perceived discrimination in loan-making which disadvantaged individuals in certain neighborhoods. It may be unfortunate or insensitive to point out, but there are certain neighborhoods or zip codes with statistically high concentrations of poverty and/or unemployment, and were I a banker or a shareholder in a bank, I would most decidedly expect to make a less-than-fully-proportionate number of loans to such a neighborhood or zip code, merely in the interest of my own fiduciary responsibility of looking after other people's money. But, no matter how reasonable the logic or responsible the actors, the outcome is otherwise from the Congress' desires, so, lo!--a new law must be enacted which, if it does other than simply continue to permit bankers to act in reasonable and responsible ways with the money in their care, it must by definition encourage them to act unreasonably and irresponsibly, no?
Today the problem is not much different: the offending banks want to enforce their rights which were established in a voluntary contract between two free and willing parties by seizing the collateral they counted on when making the loan in the first place.
Let's pause for a moment and consider why mortgage loans are typically the lowest-rate borrowing vehicle available for individuals. In spite of the seemingly interminable wait to recover their principal, banks are willing to extend credit to buy a home for lower rates than they charge for a 4-year loan on a car, which after all is also a collateralized loan. This obviously is due to the quality of the collateral, both in its tendency not to depreciate like a car does (present housing market notwithstanding) and its tendency not to disappear should the repo man come looking for it. Once the Congress convinces banks that its private contracts will be forcibly rewritten should the Congress find it convenient for their purposes to do so, the quality of that collateral has been permanently downgraded. Today it might be a forced write-down in principal, tomorrow it might be an outright ban on foreclosure, but a bank with no confidence in the sanctity of its 30-year contract and security agreement will charge a higher interest rate to protect against its expected losses due to, ahem, the vicissitudes of public policy. Mortgage interest rates would be permanently skewed higher for any comparable set of economic conditions, and that sort of confidence-destroying would be hard to undo. If interest rates for car loans are 1-2% higher than for a mortgage, you would likely permanently add a similar amount to mortgages. On a $150,000 loan for 30 years, increasing the rate from 6% to 7% costs the borrower an extra $35,506 in interest over the life of the loan. That is the consequence of Mrs Burger's proposal: in order to protect those who recently made bad decisions in the mortgage market, the rest of us would have to pay for other people's mortgages not only directly via higher taxes, but also indirectly, via higher interest expense on our own future borrowings.
"establish a Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights"
I assume she's still talking about a bill similar to the previous Congress' HR 5244, which she supported at the time. You can get into the details of this bill which never became law if you want, but suffice to say in short form: it's more of the same as the above. Banks' rights under the law are diminished, their right to change interest rates to existing customers if those customers' employment or credit situation makes them a worse credit risk are restricted, etc. I hate credit card companies as much or more than the next guy, but forbidding them from calibrating their prices for credit in response to changes in the default risks posed by their debtors is going to do one of two things: make them make fewer loans (or issue lower credit lines) in the first place, to a pool of only exceptionally-low-risk applicants; or charge everyone a higher rate out of the gate to compensate for the fact that they know they won't be able to adjust the rates of the one guy down the road who suddenly looks like a bad risk. Credit card companies are merciless and probably evil, granted, so to expect them to simply swallow the consequences on these proposed restrictions without passing on the cost to their customers in some way simply strains credulity. But no matter to Mrs Burger, as there oughta be a law 'gainst this unconscionable stuff.
"protect consumers from corporations that bury mandatory arbitration clauses in fine print"
If you think the best first recourse is to sue every time you have a dispute, or can think only of those swell punitive damages you can receive to permit you to live like a king in Patagonia off the Herculean effort you undertook to speak truth to power, etc, then arbitration is likely not for you. But, though Mrs Burger is clearly not among them, some may think the shyster lawyers involved in litigating every little thing for millions of dollars in the expectation that they'll win at least a few and pocket 33% and live like kings in Patagonia from the Herculean effort of litigating this one case are a bigger problem in society than a company trying to avoid facing countless spurious lawsuits which eventually prove more costly to defend than to settle in spite of their innocence.
Let's be generous, in the absence of hard data, and call this one an honest difference of opinion with Mrs Burger. But if you prohibit this practice, what will happen?
Any company with one of these mandatory arbitration policies must believe that this will save them money--else, why do it? Maybe they think each case will cost 20% less if it's arbitrated, maybe they think the arbitrator will never find against them, etc, but clearly they only do it if they think this will reduce some expense somewhere--warranty expense, legal expense, whatever. If this expense-reduction tool is legislated away, every CEO or board of directors who anticipates an increase in, eg., warranty expense from this can either keep their prices the same and eat the increased warranty cost, hurting their shareholders and also their workers as they now have less profit to reinvest into the company--or they can just jack up prices for everyone so that one guy who's gung-ho to have his day in court can do so.
There's a collective theme to all these items. In addition to the unintended consequence, which never seems to accidentally be a benefit, the theme here is that prices are increased for everyone so a select handful of stakeholders--home speculators, credit card spendthrifts, guys who like to sue--can have their cake and eat it too. Once you push enough handpicked constituencies through that graft mill, goods and services get pretty expensive for everyone.
Which brings me to another problem with Mrs Burger. She's advocating card check, which is designed so as to facilitate a more easy unionizing process for any particular shop. There can be no disputing its intent, which is to produce more unionized workers in this country. If this succeeds, consider for a moment how much your 99-cent box of paperclips will cost if it's made in a union plant with generous retirement benefits in California instead of in the Korean plant where it currently is. The same goes for everything else you buy. Do you think your $4.99 sub at Subway will be made any quicker or more cheaply by a union workforce with strict work rules? No: it's all a ploy to force us to band together and buy someone else a union lifestyle since none of us would want to pay for that ourselves. It's extortion, no different in substance from what the credit card banks do.
That Mrs Burger also commits the grande liberal faux-pas of also attempting to restrict the free speech of her opponents by asking the government to quash their lobbying efforts merely adds predictable insult to injury. No reasonable reading of the intent or spirit of freedom of speech permits Mrs Burger's calls for her opposition to be silenced to make any sense. Why do all these liberal types always want to silence their critics, rather than simply out-debating them? Why is it otherwise than cynical to disregard the secrecy of balloting just because secret ballots seem so often to go against your preferred outcome?
So, for all these sins that we've noticed and likely others that we have not, Mrs Burger wins the coveted Most Evil Man in America award for the week of 3/9/2009. Now someone should just design an appropriate trophy and post it in the comments section.
From today's Journal:
There's at least two things wrong with this which make this such a fine example of the type of thinking it takes to win our award.
The Union Cudgel
Big Labor gets nasty on 'card check.'
Big Labor's drive to eliminate secret ballots for union elections has united American business in opposition, so labor chiefs are putting on the brass knuckles: The new strategy is to threaten companies with government retaliation if they don't stop lobbying against turning U.S. labor markets into Europe.
We wrote on February 13 about the letter from the labor consortium Change to Win to the Financial Services Roundtable, demanding that banks receiving Troubled Asset Relief Program money keep quiet about union "card check." To its credit, the banking lobby hasn't backed down. Now Big Labor is escalating, demanding in a February 23 letter to Secretary Timothy Geithner that Treasury muzzle the companies if they won't muzzle themselves.
"Firms receiving significant TARP assistance continue to lobby against the interests of hard working taxpayers," says the letter from Change to Win Chair Anna Burger. "For example, these firms continue to oppose legislation that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage loan terms, establish a Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights and protect consumers from corporations that bury mandatory arbitration clauses in fine print."
First, and most obviously, it totally disregards the fact that policy has consequences. American lawmaking has been rife with this particular intellectual fatuity for decades now, so this is hardly newly invented by Mrs Burger. But just in this single sentence, she has called for three policies which would have entirely predictable unintended consequences:
"allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage loan terms"
This is a favorite of the left these days, and finds much favor with probable future MEMA award winners such as Chris Dodd and the evil Barney Frank. It's much like the rest of their thinking on banking and mortgage policy in general, dating at least to the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. The idea then was that these independent for-profit banks were behaving in a manner deemed unsalutary by certain aggrieved donkeys, in this case by a perceived discrimination in loan-making which disadvantaged individuals in certain neighborhoods. It may be unfortunate or insensitive to point out, but there are certain neighborhoods or zip codes with statistically high concentrations of poverty and/or unemployment, and were I a banker or a shareholder in a bank, I would most decidedly expect to make a less-than-fully-proportionate number of loans to such a neighborhood or zip code, merely in the interest of my own fiduciary responsibility of looking after other people's money. But, no matter how reasonable the logic or responsible the actors, the outcome is otherwise from the Congress' desires, so, lo!--a new law must be enacted which, if it does other than simply continue to permit bankers to act in reasonable and responsible ways with the money in their care, it must by definition encourage them to act unreasonably and irresponsibly, no?
Today the problem is not much different: the offending banks want to enforce their rights which were established in a voluntary contract between two free and willing parties by seizing the collateral they counted on when making the loan in the first place.
Let's pause for a moment and consider why mortgage loans are typically the lowest-rate borrowing vehicle available for individuals. In spite of the seemingly interminable wait to recover their principal, banks are willing to extend credit to buy a home for lower rates than they charge for a 4-year loan on a car, which after all is also a collateralized loan. This obviously is due to the quality of the collateral, both in its tendency not to depreciate like a car does (present housing market notwithstanding) and its tendency not to disappear should the repo man come looking for it. Once the Congress convinces banks that its private contracts will be forcibly rewritten should the Congress find it convenient for their purposes to do so, the quality of that collateral has been permanently downgraded. Today it might be a forced write-down in principal, tomorrow it might be an outright ban on foreclosure, but a bank with no confidence in the sanctity of its 30-year contract and security agreement will charge a higher interest rate to protect against its expected losses due to, ahem, the vicissitudes of public policy. Mortgage interest rates would be permanently skewed higher for any comparable set of economic conditions, and that sort of confidence-destroying would be hard to undo. If interest rates for car loans are 1-2% higher than for a mortgage, you would likely permanently add a similar amount to mortgages. On a $150,000 loan for 30 years, increasing the rate from 6% to 7% costs the borrower an extra $35,506 in interest over the life of the loan. That is the consequence of Mrs Burger's proposal: in order to protect those who recently made bad decisions in the mortgage market, the rest of us would have to pay for other people's mortgages not only directly via higher taxes, but also indirectly, via higher interest expense on our own future borrowings.
"establish a Credit Cardholder's Bill of Rights"
I assume she's still talking about a bill similar to the previous Congress' HR 5244, which she supported at the time. You can get into the details of this bill which never became law if you want, but suffice to say in short form: it's more of the same as the above. Banks' rights under the law are diminished, their right to change interest rates to existing customers if those customers' employment or credit situation makes them a worse credit risk are restricted, etc. I hate credit card companies as much or more than the next guy, but forbidding them from calibrating their prices for credit in response to changes in the default risks posed by their debtors is going to do one of two things: make them make fewer loans (or issue lower credit lines) in the first place, to a pool of only exceptionally-low-risk applicants; or charge everyone a higher rate out of the gate to compensate for the fact that they know they won't be able to adjust the rates of the one guy down the road who suddenly looks like a bad risk. Credit card companies are merciless and probably evil, granted, so to expect them to simply swallow the consequences on these proposed restrictions without passing on the cost to their customers in some way simply strains credulity. But no matter to Mrs Burger, as there oughta be a law 'gainst this unconscionable stuff.
"protect consumers from corporations that bury mandatory arbitration clauses in fine print"
If you think the best first recourse is to sue every time you have a dispute, or can think only of those swell punitive damages you can receive to permit you to live like a king in Patagonia off the Herculean effort you undertook to speak truth to power, etc, then arbitration is likely not for you. But, though Mrs Burger is clearly not among them, some may think the shyster lawyers involved in litigating every little thing for millions of dollars in the expectation that they'll win at least a few and pocket 33% and live like kings in Patagonia from the Herculean effort of litigating this one case are a bigger problem in society than a company trying to avoid facing countless spurious lawsuits which eventually prove more costly to defend than to settle in spite of their innocence.
Let's be generous, in the absence of hard data, and call this one an honest difference of opinion with Mrs Burger. But if you prohibit this practice, what will happen?
Any company with one of these mandatory arbitration policies must believe that this will save them money--else, why do it? Maybe they think each case will cost 20% less if it's arbitrated, maybe they think the arbitrator will never find against them, etc, but clearly they only do it if they think this will reduce some expense somewhere--warranty expense, legal expense, whatever. If this expense-reduction tool is legislated away, every CEO or board of directors who anticipates an increase in, eg., warranty expense from this can either keep their prices the same and eat the increased warranty cost, hurting their shareholders and also their workers as they now have less profit to reinvest into the company--or they can just jack up prices for everyone so that one guy who's gung-ho to have his day in court can do so.
There's a collective theme to all these items. In addition to the unintended consequence, which never seems to accidentally be a benefit, the theme here is that prices are increased for everyone so a select handful of stakeholders--home speculators, credit card spendthrifts, guys who like to sue--can have their cake and eat it too. Once you push enough handpicked constituencies through that graft mill, goods and services get pretty expensive for everyone.
Which brings me to another problem with Mrs Burger. She's advocating card check, which is designed so as to facilitate a more easy unionizing process for any particular shop. There can be no disputing its intent, which is to produce more unionized workers in this country. If this succeeds, consider for a moment how much your 99-cent box of paperclips will cost if it's made in a union plant with generous retirement benefits in California instead of in the Korean plant where it currently is. The same goes for everything else you buy. Do you think your $4.99 sub at Subway will be made any quicker or more cheaply by a union workforce with strict work rules? No: it's all a ploy to force us to band together and buy someone else a union lifestyle since none of us would want to pay for that ourselves. It's extortion, no different in substance from what the credit card banks do.
That Mrs Burger also commits the grande liberal faux-pas of also attempting to restrict the free speech of her opponents by asking the government to quash their lobbying efforts merely adds predictable insult to injury. No reasonable reading of the intent or spirit of freedom of speech permits Mrs Burger's calls for her opposition to be silenced to make any sense. Why do all these liberal types always want to silence their critics, rather than simply out-debating them? Why is it otherwise than cynical to disregard the secrecy of balloting just because secret ballots seem so often to go against your preferred outcome?
So, for all these sins that we've noticed and likely others that we have not, Mrs Burger wins the coveted Most Evil Man in America award for the week of 3/9/2009. Now someone should just design an appropriate trophy and post it in the comments section.
3/04/2009
I do notice that no matter how many of these things we do, somehow I never end up being the 1 in 9 who gets a fat government check in the mail
From today's Journal:
Mortgage Bailout to Aid 1 in 9 U.S. Homeowners
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS and RUTH SIMON
Don't misunderstand. I don't think we should do any of this, at all. But if Dear Leader is committed to throwing around my money with such abandon, it's instructive to note who he welcomes and who he excludes from the manna of his benificence.
The ability to service a mortgage is related to the cash flow in and the cash flow out, and some unrelated third-party's valuation of the asset pledged as security for the loan is a problem for the lender, not the borrower. If your house suddenly fell to half its current value but nothing else changed, the only thing going on is that the people entering the market now will be relatively better off than you since they'd buy comparable houses for much smaller loans. Your ability to service your loan has not changed a bit. Just keep making your regularly scheduled payments and everything will eventually work its way out. If you lose your job too, you have a serious problem, but note that that's a totally separate problem from the mere fact of your negative equity. Also, you wouldn't be able to use your home's equity as a credit card to buy Escalades and trips to Aruba, but that's pretty much dried up on its own anyway.
Even if a large swath of the country suddenly had negative equity, there's no reason this need trigger a wave of abandoned houses either. If your house fell to half its current value, you might not like to continue making the original payments, but in many ways it beats living in a cardboard box so in general there's a sort of inertia which mitigates in favor of continuing to make the payments.
I will point out that this whole negative-equity phenomenon isn't entirely new and previously unseen in our fair republic. Anyone who's bought a new car with zero down is underwater for the first 18 months they own it. The path out of this is well understood (make 18 monthly payments and your equity goes positive), widely implemented, and this negative equity has not sparked a rash of brand-new but abandoned vehicles littering the sidewalks merely because "it's cheaper to walk away than keep making payments if it's worth less than I owe on it."
Finally, if you want to really fix this whole economy and you want to do it John Drunkard Keynes style, the best move would be simply to bail out everyone's credit card debt, on which the country is most assuredly underwater, if by that you mean the related assets are worth less than the related debt. As an added bonus, you can bet the debt will be maxed out again in short order, thereby stimulating the economy. Brilliant!
Everyone unfortunate enough to be in the 49% who still has to pay income taxes should prepare to write a check to the government for 100% of what they earn, in order to ensure the permanent maintenance of this procession of various and sundry hand-picked constituencies, one after another, 8.3 million sheep at a time.
Mortgage Bailout to Aid 1 in 9 U.S. Homeowners
By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS and RUTH SIMON
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration announced details of a housing-rescue plan it said would help as many as many as one in nine homeowners, from low-income Americans struggling to avoid foreclosure to well-off borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.Because if there's one thing more he can do to get on my nerves, it's make me pay the mortgage of people who make more money than I do and who live in a nicer house than I do. Honestly, does anyone proofread these things for simple sensibility before making these announcements?
The package represents an effort to tackle the political challenges inherent in any housing rescue. While the administration wants a sweeping program that would prevent millions of foreclosures, it doesn't want to be seen as rewarding the greedy or reckless.Am I being hypersensitive by noting that the administration doesn't want to be seen as rewarding the reckless, while proffering no comment on its preference toward actually rewarding the reckless? I swear, it was early 1994 before I got this cynical over Bill Clinton.
It remains uncertain how successful the administration will be in overcoming one of the biggest problems to forestall private efforts to fix troubled mortgages: the objections of investors who own mortgage-backed securities.I'm not sure when Dear Leader began caring about the investor class, except possibly if one means "caring about" in a malicious, possibly carnivorous sort of way.
Administration officials made a point of noting that the loan-modification program will not aid people who bought homes merely as investments[.]As I was saying.
The second main component of the plan calls for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giants, to refinance loans for millions of borrowers who may owe more than their homes are worth, even if they are wealthy enough to afford their current payments. There is no income ceiling for beneficiaries. But they must have mortgages held or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and they cannot owe more than 105% of the current value of their home.OK, this is an important distinction, leaving aside that the "official" in question has simply skipped all the hard parts about proving that this mess is something that just happened to "these borrowers," and simply assumed that was so and jumped to the end where the caring federal government solves "these borrowers'" problems with my money. What's interesting and perhaps less maddeningly predictable is that people who are merely rich can benefit from the program, as the donkeys believe helping some nickel-and-dime garden-variety fatcat is a small price to pay for the eventual nationalization of our entire mortgage system. The investor class--as distinct from the class who are merely reasonably wealthy--has a pernicious inclination to make money that hasn't been formally blessed by Nancy Pelosi, and gets whacked twice by this whole approach: once as the mortgage-backed securities are written down, and again by excluding investors in real estate.
That raises the possibility that homeowners considered well-off by national standards may qualify for public aid.
"It's not income-targeted," says a Freddie Mac official. "It's targeted to these borrowers who have been caught in the current environment."
Don't misunderstand. I don't think we should do any of this, at all. But if Dear Leader is committed to throwing around my money with such abandon, it's instructive to note who he welcomes and who he excludes from the manna of his benificence.
At the end of December, 8.3 million borrowers, representing one in five U.S. single-family homes with mortgage debt, owed more than their houses were worth, according to a report Wednesday by First American CoreLogic, a Santa Ana, Calif., real-estate research firm.Let me be the first to actually say, with regard to being underwater on a mortgage, so what? In general, especially if we're limiting our discussion (as above) to people who bought homes with the idea of living in them, going underwater on the loan just doesn't have much practical effect unless or until you need to sell it. So, yes, if in some trail-of-tears duress such a homeowner is forced to sell his house and move, being underwater would be really inconvenient. But otherwise, what's the big deal?
The ability to service a mortgage is related to the cash flow in and the cash flow out, and some unrelated third-party's valuation of the asset pledged as security for the loan is a problem for the lender, not the borrower. If your house suddenly fell to half its current value but nothing else changed, the only thing going on is that the people entering the market now will be relatively better off than you since they'd buy comparable houses for much smaller loans. Your ability to service your loan has not changed a bit. Just keep making your regularly scheduled payments and everything will eventually work its way out. If you lose your job too, you have a serious problem, but note that that's a totally separate problem from the mere fact of your negative equity. Also, you wouldn't be able to use your home's equity as a credit card to buy Escalades and trips to Aruba, but that's pretty much dried up on its own anyway.
Even if a large swath of the country suddenly had negative equity, there's no reason this need trigger a wave of abandoned houses either. If your house fell to half its current value, you might not like to continue making the original payments, but in many ways it beats living in a cardboard box so in general there's a sort of inertia which mitigates in favor of continuing to make the payments.
I will point out that this whole negative-equity phenomenon isn't entirely new and previously unseen in our fair republic. Anyone who's bought a new car with zero down is underwater for the first 18 months they own it. The path out of this is well understood (make 18 monthly payments and your equity goes positive), widely implemented, and this negative equity has not sparked a rash of brand-new but abandoned vehicles littering the sidewalks merely because "it's cheaper to walk away than keep making payments if it's worth less than I owe on it."
Finally, if you want to really fix this whole economy and you want to do it John Drunkard Keynes style, the best move would be simply to bail out everyone's credit card debt, on which the country is most assuredly underwater, if by that you mean the related assets are worth less than the related debt. As an added bonus, you can bet the debt will be maxed out again in short order, thereby stimulating the economy. Brilliant!
Everyone unfortunate enough to be in the 49% who still has to pay income taxes should prepare to write a check to the government for 100% of what they earn, in order to ensure the permanent maintenance of this procession of various and sundry hand-picked constituencies, one after another, 8.3 million sheep at a time.
3/01/2009
Have you hugged your Tocqueville today?
So perhaps the poll for this week should be: do you want BHO's Excellent Adventure of a budget/stimulus/recovery fantasy to work, or don't you?
I have mixed feelings on this: recessions, especially bad ones, are not to be wished for; but on the other hand, the success (or appearance of success) of an economic plan which reduces all of us to the level of Tocqueville's "industrious animals" has the (equally?) deleterious effect of rendering permanent such programs as Dear Leader can implement. I am convinced that even the success (much less its failed but permanent implementation) of the BHO atrocity exhibition is to doom our fair republic to share the European fate, to have our wills enervated at the teat of the government tutelage, to emasculate those among us prepared to work and compete and do the unpleasant tasks involved in providing for our families.
Is the success of this program to be wished, even at the expense of a recession? Or would a nation of free men rather be 20% poorer but continue to live as free men instead of being enslaved to the tender, caring mercies of a benevlolent despot of a federal government?
I ask rhetorically, of course. But this is what our nation has reduced to: a craven desire for comfort above freedom, and it will prove costly in the end.
I have mixed feelings on this: recessions, especially bad ones, are not to be wished for; but on the other hand, the success (or appearance of success) of an economic plan which reduces all of us to the level of Tocqueville's "industrious animals" has the (equally?) deleterious effect of rendering permanent such programs as Dear Leader can implement. I am convinced that even the success (much less its failed but permanent implementation) of the BHO atrocity exhibition is to doom our fair republic to share the European fate, to have our wills enervated at the teat of the government tutelage, to emasculate those among us prepared to work and compete and do the unpleasant tasks involved in providing for our families.
Is the success of this program to be wished, even at the expense of a recession? Or would a nation of free men rather be 20% poorer but continue to live as free men instead of being enslaved to the tender, caring mercies of a benevlolent despot of a federal government?
I ask rhetorically, of course. But this is what our nation has reduced to: a craven desire for comfort above freedom, and it will prove costly in the end.
2/25/2009
The false aphorisms of our fathers
I am puzzled--nay, not puzzled, but amused, or something close to it that mixes a grim resignation to laugh in the face of folly during our long march to the broad sunlit uplands with a desire to point out that I was right all along even though the point is now well past where that matters--anyway, I have gratefully noticed that two of the more annoying aphorisms of the past decade have entirely disappeared now, even though they're arguably more appropriate now than they ever were during the Bush administration.
See if you can place these in their proper context (cough, stimulus bill) but also recall the last time you heard a gleeful donkey utter them falsely about, oh, Iraq:
1. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.
2. The first rule of being in a hole is, stop digging.
Both of these dull ersatz witticisms were like having sand in your knickers--a dull, inescapably annoying presence which by all rights should disappear but doesn't. They basically offer as a substitute for actual argument, and are usually presented with a tiresome and entirely unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction. But these nonetheless were common phrases but a few months ago.
As we begin a, shall we say, experimental hair of the dog approach to combating the deleterious effects of the bursting of our recent credit bubble by spending everyone else's money in what will likely prove a vain attempt to re-inflate it, I surprisingly haven't heard Helen Thomas or Andrea Mitchell utter these aphoristic droplets of the wisdom of the gods; nor have I heard them lob up softball questions to an interviewee in a predictable attempt to elicit such remarks.
Has anyone else noticed this?
On balance I'd rather have the annoying folk wisdom but also a president who was bankrupting the country through more incompetence than malice than the reverse situation, which is pretty much what we have now. But, there you have it: I have identified a positive effect of the reign of Dear Leader! And you thought I couldn't do it.
See if you can place these in their proper context (cough, stimulus bill) but also recall the last time you heard a gleeful donkey utter them falsely about, oh, Iraq:
1. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.
2. The first rule of being in a hole is, stop digging.
Both of these dull ersatz witticisms were like having sand in your knickers--a dull, inescapably annoying presence which by all rights should disappear but doesn't. They basically offer as a substitute for actual argument, and are usually presented with a tiresome and entirely unearned sense of smug self-satisfaction. But these nonetheless were common phrases but a few months ago.
As we begin a, shall we say, experimental hair of the dog approach to combating the deleterious effects of the bursting of our recent credit bubble by spending everyone else's money in what will likely prove a vain attempt to re-inflate it, I surprisingly haven't heard Helen Thomas or Andrea Mitchell utter these aphoristic droplets of the wisdom of the gods; nor have I heard them lob up softball questions to an interviewee in a predictable attempt to elicit such remarks.
Has anyone else noticed this?
On balance I'd rather have the annoying folk wisdom but also a president who was bankrupting the country through more incompetence than malice than the reverse situation, which is pretty much what we have now. But, there you have it: I have identified a positive effect of the reign of Dear Leader! And you thought I couldn't do it.
2/13/2009
Socialism lands in America
From today's Journal:
Gosh, do you think so?
In my household we prefer to judge whether we can perpetually finance the levels of debt we're carrying before dropping a massive sum of cash on something. We actually have a name for the process ("budget") and we rather quaintly think of it as "deciding whether we can afford it." Though admittedly it's swell if you can get in the drunken orgy of spending first, and then can forcibly extort enough to pay for it by threat of force like the government does, without you yourself going to jail for this, which most of us who aren't high-level donkey cabinet appointees can't pull off.
This is shrewd, if a bit obvious, in a Sun Tzu kind of way. After all, the senate hasn't yet completed its formality of voting on the bill no one has had time to read, and it's not been signed into law yet, so scheduling a "fiscal responsibility summit" to address what is now referred to as a "debt crisis" before he's even finished inking the monstrosity of a law that causes the debt crisis takes a special type of chutzpah, and frankly I'm envious because I'd never be able to say any of that with a straight face. The bit of referring to the resultant debt as a "crisis" is especially rich for anyone with enough imagination to anticipate the forthcoming "emergency" legislation to raise taxes (presumably only on 49% of us)which will be so crucially urgent to the survival of the republic that no one will be permitted time to read or debate the bill before voting on it. I hope they call it something really catchy because the clever focus-tested name of the law is usually the only enjoyment I get from these things.
But anyone who believed that any of this cool new cash giveaway was temporary and that eventually, after the economy is saved by Dear Leader, we'd restore fiscal sanity by trimming some of this, ahem, one-time emergency spending rather than raising everyone's taxes to European levels probably was the sort who believed he was the change he had been waiting for, or perhaps is just a member of the 51% of the country who pay no income tax.
Any republican or conservative who found some trancendental nonsense reason to vote for Dear Leader back in November, you've by now been slapped upside the head with the cold tuna of reality. Let me be the first to say, welcome back, and thanks again for your thoughtful vote.
It did finally dawn on me this week what's really going on with all this, in a macro sense. It's been pretty clear for years that a large slice of our fair republic embraced the part of the American dream that involved owning large houses and fancy "luxury" trucks and multiple plasma TVs and whatnot, and a large slice of that group simply discarded as the "failed policies of the past" the notion that one's ability to actually pay for those things was more than tangentially related to the act of acquiring them. And now, when we as a society have maxed out our credit cards and borrowed every cent of equity from our houses and had a losing streak at the racetrack, we no longer recognize the need to stop. We simply band together under the belief that all of our shitty credit scores amalgamated into a single giant US Treasury Mastercard can allow the lifestyle to continue, at least until that stops working and the Chinese decide that they'd rather invest their billions in fireworks or something instead of worthless junk bonds issued with the full faith and credit of a government long ago bankrupted by 51% of its own people, and by then all this will generally be someone else's problem anyway.
And the best part of it is, if you're one of those who think this is a good idea, there's at least a 51% chance that you won't ever have to pay for it either. Shazam!, and congratulations. Really, for that 51%, all this is a smart play; they have little to lose in the short term and will be hurt relatively less than the rest of us in the long term, so why not?
Not to say that we're totally fucked or anything.
Obama to Shift Focus to Budget Deficit
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
With a $787 billion stimulus package in hand, President Barack Obama will pivot quickly to address a budget deficit that could now approach $2 trillion this year.
He has scheduled a "fiscal-responsibility summit" on Feb. 23 and will unveil a budget blueprint three days later, crafted to put pressure on politicians to address the country's surging long-term debt crisis.
Speaking Friday to business leaders at the White House, the president defended the surge of spending in the stimulus plan, but he made sure to add: "It's important for us to think in the midterm and long term. And over that midterm and long term, we're going to have to have fiscal discipline. We are not going to be able to perpetually finance the levels of debt that the federal government is currently carrying."
Gosh, do you think so?
In my household we prefer to judge whether we can perpetually finance the levels of debt we're carrying before dropping a massive sum of cash on something. We actually have a name for the process ("budget") and we rather quaintly think of it as "deciding whether we can afford it." Though admittedly it's swell if you can get in the drunken orgy of spending first, and then can forcibly extort enough to pay for it by threat of force like the government does, without you yourself going to jail for this, which most of us who aren't high-level donkey cabinet appointees can't pull off.
This is shrewd, if a bit obvious, in a Sun Tzu kind of way. After all, the senate hasn't yet completed its formality of voting on the bill no one has had time to read, and it's not been signed into law yet, so scheduling a "fiscal responsibility summit" to address what is now referred to as a "debt crisis" before he's even finished inking the monstrosity of a law that causes the debt crisis takes a special type of chutzpah, and frankly I'm envious because I'd never be able to say any of that with a straight face. The bit of referring to the resultant debt as a "crisis" is especially rich for anyone with enough imagination to anticipate the forthcoming "emergency" legislation to raise taxes (presumably only on 49% of us)which will be so crucially urgent to the survival of the republic that no one will be permitted time to read or debate the bill before voting on it. I hope they call it something really catchy because the clever focus-tested name of the law is usually the only enjoyment I get from these things.
But anyone who believed that any of this cool new cash giveaway was temporary and that eventually, after the economy is saved by Dear Leader, we'd restore fiscal sanity by trimming some of this, ahem, one-time emergency spending rather than raising everyone's taxes to European levels probably was the sort who believed he was the change he had been waiting for, or perhaps is just a member of the 51% of the country who pay no income tax.
Any republican or conservative who found some trancendental nonsense reason to vote for Dear Leader back in November, you've by now been slapped upside the head with the cold tuna of reality. Let me be the first to say, welcome back, and thanks again for your thoughtful vote.
It did finally dawn on me this week what's really going on with all this, in a macro sense. It's been pretty clear for years that a large slice of our fair republic embraced the part of the American dream that involved owning large houses and fancy "luxury" trucks and multiple plasma TVs and whatnot, and a large slice of that group simply discarded as the "failed policies of the past" the notion that one's ability to actually pay for those things was more than tangentially related to the act of acquiring them. And now, when we as a society have maxed out our credit cards and borrowed every cent of equity from our houses and had a losing streak at the racetrack, we no longer recognize the need to stop. We simply band together under the belief that all of our shitty credit scores amalgamated into a single giant US Treasury Mastercard can allow the lifestyle to continue, at least until that stops working and the Chinese decide that they'd rather invest their billions in fireworks or something instead of worthless junk bonds issued with the full faith and credit of a government long ago bankrupted by 51% of its own people, and by then all this will generally be someone else's problem anyway.
And the best part of it is, if you're one of those who think this is a good idea, there's at least a 51% chance that you won't ever have to pay for it either. Shazam!, and congratulations. Really, for that 51%, all this is a smart play; they have little to lose in the short term and will be hurt relatively less than the rest of us in the long term, so why not?
Not to say that we're totally fucked or anything.
2/03/2009
The Ghoul Steps Aside
I'm delighted to read today that South Dakota wheat farmer Tom "the Ghoul" Daschle has withdrawn from his multiple appointments as Sultan of HHS and Healthcare Socialization Czar. The proximate reason for relieving the nation of what would surely follow from submitting the health care system to his tender mercies is that he is a tax cheat. An ordinary citizen, one who was actually subject to the laws imposed on us by our anointed political betters rather than levitating gracefully above them, would likely face criminal charges of tax evasion for his "oversight."
I've been slightly displeased to note lately that the same donkeys who so piously advocate taking more of my tax dollars as a matter of fairness, patriotism, etc, seem all to be tax cheats escaping from any real consequences of their willful transgressions. Charlie Rangel heads the Ways & Means Committee, which writes our fair republic's copious tax laws, though he himself seems not to pay his own taxes. Allegedly. And now alleged or admitted tax cheat Tim Geithner heads the federal department of which the benighted Internal Revenue Service is a part. In this context, BHO's nominee to the made-up playtime position of Chief Performance Officer ("Special Watchdog," quoth The One Himself) of an alleged or admitted tax cheat seems almost quaint in its embarrassing irony and general harmlessness. But Geithner heading Treasury boggles the mind. How can that man in clear conscience ever prosecute anyone for evading taxes, or even set rules and procedures for the supposedly evenhanded and just administration of our federal tax system? Cats and dogs lying down together, and the world has gone mad.
As many writers smarter and quicker to the pen than I have been have already said this week, it's no wonder donkeys advocate for higher tax rates...since they're all too clever, lawyerly, and politically connected to have to actually pay them. Badump-bump. Or is that not actually funny, but perhaps a legitimate criticism despite the sophomorically delicious symmetry of the presentation? The rule of law, even more than freedom and liberty, is what sets a civilized nation apart from a banana republic (freedom and liberty are what, within the pantheon of supposedly civilized nations, sets the US apart from France or Denmark, though our latest congress may be disposed in favor of dispensing with most of the things that set us apart from the Lands of Youth Street Riots). Arbitrary justice and arbitrary suspension of justice amount to essentially the same thing, and that a priveleged handful are quasi-exempt from the laws the rest of us toil under is unforgivable. Rangel and Geithner are clearly not penalized in the least for their offenses, which in the former case are ongoing for pete's sake.
Let's even be charitable for a moment, contrary to all appearances and to all of my established style of writing, and suppose all these multiple violations of the income tax code really are accidental. Unintentional oversights committed by some of the smartest people in the United States, each of whom possesses a vast familiarity with the workings of the federal government, and each of whom is wealthy enough to hire a batallion of CPAs and attorneys to ensure complete voluntary compliance with the internal revenue code. Yes, and let us suppose further that each of these civic-minded democrats who have achieved prominence within the party by decrying the greed of the rich and pledging themselves to the tireless pursuit of justice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised yearns desperately to comply with the tax code and pay their fair share of the burden of supporting the less fortunate. And let us suspend disbelief a further moment while imagining that despite the best intentions, they found themselves on the wrong side of the many byzantine twists of the 16,000 pages which make up the IRC.
Can there be a clearer indictment of the ridicularity of the whole social-engineering morass that is the IRC? Pray, brother Geithner and your elected masters in the federal congress, deliver us from the tyranny of the IRC and give us a tax code that actually makes sense. Alexander Hamilton's first federal tax code ran to three pages. If you really would like to see the tax gap eradicated and increase the productivity and profitability of small business, we could do so simply by deciding on whatever tax rate we want and applying it uniformly to all types of income. But that uniformity and transparency which you or I might find desireable traits of an elected government would strip our congressional masters of the power to select the winners and the losers, and to favor some constituencies and disfavor others. And wherever would they find the motivation to do such a thing?
Still, the Ghoul has been vanquished. We soldier on.
I've been slightly displeased to note lately that the same donkeys who so piously advocate taking more of my tax dollars as a matter of fairness, patriotism, etc, seem all to be tax cheats escaping from any real consequences of their willful transgressions. Charlie Rangel heads the Ways & Means Committee, which writes our fair republic's copious tax laws, though he himself seems not to pay his own taxes. Allegedly. And now alleged or admitted tax cheat Tim Geithner heads the federal department of which the benighted Internal Revenue Service is a part. In this context, BHO's nominee to the made-up playtime position of Chief Performance Officer ("Special Watchdog," quoth The One Himself) of an alleged or admitted tax cheat seems almost quaint in its embarrassing irony and general harmlessness. But Geithner heading Treasury boggles the mind. How can that man in clear conscience ever prosecute anyone for evading taxes, or even set rules and procedures for the supposedly evenhanded and just administration of our federal tax system? Cats and dogs lying down together, and the world has gone mad.
As many writers smarter and quicker to the pen than I have been have already said this week, it's no wonder donkeys advocate for higher tax rates...since they're all too clever, lawyerly, and politically connected to have to actually pay them. Badump-bump. Or is that not actually funny, but perhaps a legitimate criticism despite the sophomorically delicious symmetry of the presentation? The rule of law, even more than freedom and liberty, is what sets a civilized nation apart from a banana republic (freedom and liberty are what, within the pantheon of supposedly civilized nations, sets the US apart from France or Denmark, though our latest congress may be disposed in favor of dispensing with most of the things that set us apart from the Lands of Youth Street Riots). Arbitrary justice and arbitrary suspension of justice amount to essentially the same thing, and that a priveleged handful are quasi-exempt from the laws the rest of us toil under is unforgivable. Rangel and Geithner are clearly not penalized in the least for their offenses, which in the former case are ongoing for pete's sake.
Let's even be charitable for a moment, contrary to all appearances and to all of my established style of writing, and suppose all these multiple violations of the income tax code really are accidental. Unintentional oversights committed by some of the smartest people in the United States, each of whom possesses a vast familiarity with the workings of the federal government, and each of whom is wealthy enough to hire a batallion of CPAs and attorneys to ensure complete voluntary compliance with the internal revenue code. Yes, and let us suppose further that each of these civic-minded democrats who have achieved prominence within the party by decrying the greed of the rich and pledging themselves to the tireless pursuit of justice for the downtrodden and disenfranchised yearns desperately to comply with the tax code and pay their fair share of the burden of supporting the less fortunate. And let us suspend disbelief a further moment while imagining that despite the best intentions, they found themselves on the wrong side of the many byzantine twists of the 16,000 pages which make up the IRC.
Can there be a clearer indictment of the ridicularity of the whole social-engineering morass that is the IRC? Pray, brother Geithner and your elected masters in the federal congress, deliver us from the tyranny of the IRC and give us a tax code that actually makes sense. Alexander Hamilton's first federal tax code ran to three pages. If you really would like to see the tax gap eradicated and increase the productivity and profitability of small business, we could do so simply by deciding on whatever tax rate we want and applying it uniformly to all types of income. But that uniformity and transparency which you or I might find desireable traits of an elected government would strip our congressional masters of the power to select the winners and the losers, and to favor some constituencies and disfavor others. And wherever would they find the motivation to do such a thing?
Still, the Ghoul has been vanquished. We soldier on.
1/20/2009
And so it begins
I've actually been rather looking forward to today.
Not so much because I've been running low on wispy promises of hope. I do have plenty of that lying around as it is. But more because I have for a few weeks sensed that George Bush was done, that he had done all he could do, and that frankly as he sought to leave town with his head held as high as the last eight years of partisan whippings would allow, he wanted to be done as well.
And who could blame him? We live in tumultuous times and his has been a momentous presidency. There remains ample time for post-mortem analysis of the last eight years; in summary let's say for now that on the two biggest issues he faced--war and the fundamental role of government in a free society--he gets a passing grade on one, no matter the howls of the moveon.org jackals.
Apparently the least sensible 51% of our nation's electorate deplore George Bush, everything he has done or hasn't done, and everyone who has voted for him. Since leftists have no manners--is it still impolite to discuss politics or religion in mixed company, or does that only apply to conservatives?--one feels bombarded by the noise, the shouts of treason! lies!, the contentious acrimony of our political landscape, everywhere one goes. It's tiresome enough that like an exasperated parent, I'm willing to give the tyrant child their way just so as to have a bit of peace. And because Republicans tend to be older and less petulant than the Youth Movement, not to mention better employed, there tends to be far less preposterous and unhinged braying from the opposition party when the donkeys are in power. So the donkeys' collectively grotesque overreaction to the last eight years is about to be improperly rewarded by catapulting them to power with a relatively compliant--at least lucid--opposition party.
I have managed to remain neither impressed nor horrified by the new president's transition to power since the election, the neutrality of which sentiment I suppose is far superior to the likeliest alternative. I have heard a few pronouncements from our handsome new ruler that acknowledge the difficulty of real decisions made by grownups with real responsibility--buckling on closing Guantanamo comes to mind as merely the most obvious--which one might regard as a good thing in fair comparison to the juvenile and duplicitous (but deliciously persuasive) assurances he offered during the campaign that there Are No Hard Choices. My reassurance at hearing his modestly more responsible post-election remarks was tempered by my parental instinct to punish the child who lies and certainly not to reward such bad behavior, which after all only encourages its repetition. The last thing we should do is collectively encourage our political betters to lie to us with the assurance that it lies which are sufficiently comely will not be closely examined, yet here we are.
I think, as we embark upon what may be a long period of leftist ascendancy, that this analogy of the petulant and ill-disciplined child neatly encapsulates my thinking on the matter. Leftists today are, to a great extent, leftists because they lack the courage to make hard choices. They have used their ferociously superior intellectual prowess to convince themselves that the path of least resistance always coincides with the path of virtue--which is convenient enough to discover, once you've stipulated that the only path you'll consider is the path of least resistance. There's a childlike naivete to the whole thing which would be charming if it weren't so pernicious. I don't mean the courage to speak truth to power by writing snotty letters to the editor of the New York Times about how the teh Evil Chimpy McBushHitler has shredded the bill of rights (or at least the portions thereof receiving of leftist approbation).
Why is it the leftists are never the ones willing to stand up for our nation's heritage if that might offend some foreigner? Or support any war, over any principle, without pusillanimous cries that War is Never the Answer? If you can't think of any principle that would be worth fighting a war over, it's a sad little existence you have on your little planet. The idea of owning a gun to defend yourself? Deploying Pershing missiles in Germany to stare down the Soviets? Developing missile defense systems? (The word "defense" is right there in the phrase itself! Yet this is aggressive warmongering.)
Taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions and bad decisions? How about acknowledging that the government can't actually tax and spend our way to national prosperity and that one must learn to compete in a scary world where--shudder--one might not succeed.
Why was it sexy in the 1980s and 1990s to wear Free Tibet t-shirts and flaunt the cynical and undemocratic realpolitik which supposedly prized stability over democracy and human rights, but when faced with an actual opportunity to remove an actual real-life brutal dictator from power, leftists immediately shat out Quagmire! No Blood for Oil! I suspect that the moment supporting freedom and human rights against dictators and all that stopped being sexy was when George Bush had the stones to actually do it, as the least worst option available, and the inconvenient and damnable unpleasantness of actually fighting for a principle instead of simply waxing philosophic about it promptly made it too much for the infantile Left to bear.
No, it's pretty obvious that any political position requiring a little steel in the spine will likely be exactly the opposite of what the donkey wants. My biggest hope for our new benevolent ruler is that his ambition to succeed tempers his ideological predisposition to genuflect before Nancy Pelosi and Ron Gettelfinger and the Sierra Club. If it does, there is a hope that only some, and not necessarily the worst, of our fears will be realized.
1/10/2009
Blitzkreig
Just a quick hit today:
The always trenchant Victor Davis Hanson has a new essay up today which, as usual, is essential reading. Mr Hanson touches on BHO's adoption of much of the reviled George Bush's policy stances, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned, and wonders whether the enthusiasm with which his impending ascension is viewed in, eg., the middle east, is because the Islamists think he will be a better partner or because they think his naivete will permit the Islamists' agendas to advance. I wonder.
If, like me, you can scarcely get enough Victor Davis Hanson, you should not fail to visit his own Private Papers collection of online writings, and visit it often.
Last year I read his startlingly good account of the the Pelopponesian War, entitled simply A War Like No Other. For all the nuanced talk among our university elites since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003 about the Americans being like the "evil," militaristic Spartans, I actually found much of his description of Athenian public debate to be not terribly dissimilar from the destructively self-indulgent flavor of much of our own internal debates. If anything, I found the Spartan singularity of purpose and desperate sense of self-preservation to be utterly beyond what our country is presently capable of, since we feel so securely unthreatened that we feel we can safely indulge ourselves a little bit with the pretty, subtle sophistry of our presidential campaigns and senate debates.
Also, if you are the least bit interested in the notion of assymetrical warfare, Mr Hanson captures the essential struggle between a nation with an unparalleled army and another with a supreme navy, what happens when huge infantry forces are confronted with tiny mobile cavalry forces, the mixture between light and heavy infantry on the battlefield, and honor and morale in combat. It's doubtless the best military history I've read, and I recommend it if you have any interest in either the Pelopponesian War or assymetric warfare in general.
1/06/2009
The Effs of Texas are upon you.
Eff eff eff eff eff. Eff. EFF. Effin eff eff eff. EFF all of the effin effers. Eff. Eff eff eff eff eff eff eff eff. Effity effin effs.
I wish I could say something positive, but all I'm coming up with is Eff. Strangely, in a game I expected the Bucks to lose badly, one which I rather bravely dismissed as nearly unwinnable but remained hopeful they'd just make the final respectable, this particular three point loss was the most galling outcome I've seen since...I don't know. Florida '06? Michigan '96? USC three months ago?
Words fail. Eff.
I wish I could say something positive, but all I'm coming up with is Eff. Strangely, in a game I expected the Bucks to lose badly, one which I rather bravely dismissed as nearly unwinnable but remained hopeful they'd just make the final respectable, this particular three point loss was the most galling outcome I've seen since...I don't know. Florida '06? Michigan '96? USC three months ago?
Words fail. Eff.
12/30/2008
Farewell the Trumpets, as the Brits would say
There's a fascinating article in the Journal from earlier this week called "Russian Professor Predicts End of US." It's written by a Russian fellow called Igor Panarin. I'll let the article's author, Andrew Osborn, introduce Mr Panarin and his theory:
MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.
In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even
stronger."Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.
This whole concept intrigues me and has done for years.
It's easy to dismiss anyone who warns of Dire Things to Come as a nutjob, crackpot, Nostradomus wannabe, black-helicopter-Michigan-Militia type. And more often than not, this dismissal is probably appropriate. But a theme I have touched on repeatedly in my previous essays is the fundamental and profound unseriousness with which this country of ours conducts its affairs. I've been using Social Security as my favorite Most Pressing Issue in this regard since early 2005, when it became apparent that George Bush's fellow Republicans in the Congress were content to kick Social Security reform down the road to a future administration to deal with.
Surely we all recall the halcyon days of early 2005, no? The win in the bitter election season had produced some alleged political capital to the returning president, some of which he intended to spend on reforming the great hulking albatross of Social Security which hangs round our collective necks. By June 2005 this initiative was dead. While there's surely little point in rehashing the battles of two Congresses ago, the failure to either fix or kill Social Security when the president made it his top domestic agenda item is symptomatic of a large and unattractive feature of modern political discourse in the US (and Europe): a connection to reality that is tenuous and occasional at best.
The details of the Social Security budget aren't that essential for the current discussion, so allow me to summarize: at some point the number of workers paying into the system at present tax rates will be insufficient to support the projected number of retirees drawing from the system at present benefit levels. (Poof! Complex issues made simple.) At present we are (and even in 2005, we were) running some pretty considerable budget deficits even when Social Security was a net contributor to the federal budget, and it is to be supposed that the budget deficits would become unacceptably large at such time as Social Security becomes a net drain on the federal budget. (Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the Congress and our fearless and handsome president-elect appear prepared to regard even staggeringly, unfathomably large deficits with total insouciance.) There are a number of solutions, none of which is terribly complex:
1. Reduce future benefits in some way.
2. Increase future tax receipts in some way.
3. Some combination of 1 and 2.
4. Recognize that the system has become unwieldy for our current economic and demographic climate, and fundamentally restructure it.
5. Decide that all the above are politically undesireable in some way and defer the decision until the budgetary crisis is of sufficient gravity that politicians will be rewarded for taking "brave and decisive" steps to address it.
There are probably other approaches, but I'm pretty sure most of them are just a flavor variant away from being one of the above five.
Naturally our illustrious betters in the federal Congress (which was under nominal Republican control at the time) chose option number 5. In 2008 the foreclosure epidemic, with its effect on the credit markets, and the frozen credit markets' effect on the stock markets, and so forth created a sort of perfect storm where action was unavoidable. It will take a similar crisis in Social Security to achieve action there; I have observed through this that decisions taken at 2AM on a Sunday so as to be able to calm jittery markets before their Monday opening tend not always to be duly thought out. Has anyone really noticed that we've spent half the TARP money to no noticeable effect and with little accountability? That is, after all, $350 billion--mostly wasted because our political betters won't act on anything save perpetuating their own political careers, until God's own hammer comes down wreaking sweet vengeful justice on the wicked and innocent alike.
So how does this ressurection of a four-year old political non-event factor into our good Mr Panarin's forecast?
Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.[...]He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.
California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.[...]Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.
Let's assume for the sake of discussion that he's wrong on the particulars, especially the date, and instead give consideration to the underlying question. This first step in the evaluation process is the one which normally is skipped--to talk like this about the United States after all seems more than a little ridiculous. So much easier to skip to the conclusion: nutjob. Impossible. But this skipping about over the hard parts of analysis strikes a bit as evidencing intellectual laziness, and it's here that we will find the seed of our fair republic's eventual undoing (never mind that our foreign debt is, in fact, fundamentally a pyramid scheme).
Let's start with what ought to be an uncontroversial proposition: the days of the United States being the world's sole military superpower, and its foremost economic power, will eventually come to an end at some point in the far reaches of future events--yes? Rome was once the world's mightiest empire and its capital and its reaches were referred to as "Eternal Rome." Now it's merely the 7th largest economy in GDP terms, which certainly isn't bad given that it comes mainly on the backs of Ferrari and Beretta, but it's a rather distant 7th at less than one-sixth that of the US. And less than a hundred years ago, Britain was the greatest empire in history in its geographic span and its military and economic prowess, and it is today similarly reduced in stature. And, for added relevance, the Victorian Empire came to an end as the result of a war which Britain won but which saddled them with insurmountable foreign debt and insufficient exports to actually satisfy their overseas financial obligations (does this sound familiar?). So: empires end. Yes?
Let's continue with what ought again to be uncontroversial: the world is an unfriendly (often hostile) and competitive place. Our own perpetual dominance of the world economy is by no means a certainty. China, with its >1B population and slave labor, may well overtake us one day. India, a nuclear-armed democracy with a population far greater than our own, may do so as well. What can keep us the world Number One is a lot of hard work, continued innovation, etc--basically the same instincts and attitudes that got us where we are to begin with. But so much of our ruling class has become totally divorced from the basic human condition--that of a medium-sized hairless mammal trying to ensure survival in a dangerous and difficult world--that we have become willing to tie our own hands competitively, simply assuming that our rightful place in the universe of nations will be ever unchanged and unchallenged.
Let's consider the accomplishments of the 110th federal Congress.
The current Congress will most likely be remembered for a $700 billion bailout lawmakers passed in October, in response to turmoil in financial markets. The bill allows the Treasury Department to buy troubled mortgages from financial institutions and stock in financial firms to limit the global economic fallout from drops in home prices and increases in foreclosures.
Top lawmakers quickly wrote the legislation in a series of round-the-clock negotiations with the White House over several days in late September. However, House lawmakers balked at being perceived as bailing out Wall Street and caught leadership by surprise by rejecting the initial measure — a move that sent stock prices plummeting.
A few days later, the bailout measure was approved by both chambers, but only after lawmakers added new oversight provisions for managing the $700 billion. Also, “sweeteners” were tacked onto the measure, including bipartisan mental health parity legislation and extensions for a package of popular tax breaks.
So even when faced with a genuine SHTF crisis, we confess ourselves unable to pay attention long enough to simply deal with the present crisis, at least without LOOK! A SQUIRREL!! funding special pet projects totally unrelated to dealing with the matter at hand. Exhibit A.
In 2007, lawmakers also passed an energy bill that that will raise fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles for the first time since 1975. Additionally, the measure would set new requirements for developing renewable fuels and contains numerous provisions to promote energy efficiency.
“This legislation is a historical turning point in American environmental policy,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said.
Exhibit B. The congress clearly has satisfied itself that we don't actually have to compete in the messy, fussy world of automotive manufacture. Evidently, we can instead focus our efforts on writing laws about how many miles per gallon to get, and that all cars be equipped with traction control, and the like--both measures have to make a congressman (or -woman, let's not be sexist by failing to recognize the contributions of women toward realizing these deleterious accomplishments) feel good about his work for the day. But it just raised the cost of every car sold in this country, and lowered the standard of living for every person who now has to pay more for a car. But our standard of living is so high, it won't matter if we shave just a little bit off of it so the congress can feel good about itself.
GOP lawmakers said Congress’ most significant action on energy came this fall when leaders opted not to renew a long-standing federal ban on offshore oil drilling.
True. But it failed to repeal the still-continuing ban on ANWR oil exploration despite what at the time was $4.50 gasoline. The Congress, evidently including even Republicans, has satisfied itself that we don't need to utilize resources that we already own here on US soil if it harms the delicate sensibilities of the greener members of the congress. Even if ANWR was only capable of making a small difference in the price of fuel, the clear choice was (and is) between (a) let's make a small difference in the price of fuel, and create a bunch of construction jobs in the process, or (b) let's leave ANWR pristine for the caribou and not create a bunch of jobs in the process. The slight degradation to the standard of living of everyone in this country who buys fuel won't matter much since our standard of living is really high anyway, and not creating the thousands of jobs the project implies is also appropriate since we have so many jobs laying around unused as it is.
Also, it's worth observing that the most positive accomplishment by the last congress was an act of omission, rather than comission, which kind of says it all.
Other key legislation that passed included [a] five-year, nearly $300 billion farm bill authorizing federal agriculture and nutrition programs, despite a White House veto.
Once we've run up the price of corn to astronomical levels thanks to ethanol mandates, which also increases the price of any products with corn as ingredients, or any animal products (eg., beef and milk) fed with corn, we should be looking for ways out of giving subsidies to farmers since their products are certainly priced quite generously at present. Instead we decided to give them $300B, which even by federal government standards is a reasonably large wad of cash. Our craven but otherwise excellent political overlords have determined that they don't want to ask farmers to sacrifice the subsidies they've grown accustomed to, especially given that the farmers might then make some of the politicians unemployed, so naturally asking them (the farmers--and, come to think of it, the politicians) to compete on a level field without subsidies is out of the question. Even though this reduces the average taxpayer's standard of living slightly (both because of the taxing which must be done in order to, ahem, redistribute the $300B and by inflating the price of most of our foodstuffs) this won't matter much because our own standard of living is teh awesome already.
It would be possible to continue--really, it would--but this ought really to summarize the flavor. Every time you hear a mandate issued by the government, you should wonder if a hungry competitor in China bears the same burden, and if we can simply assume repeatedly that our standard of living is just so awesome that we can afford to sacrifice little slices and bits of it at every turn for measures which make our elected betters feel warm and titilated inside. Our hungry competitors operate under no such compunctions, and the day may well come that our self-indulgence and intellectual laziness catches up with us.
Will that day be in summer of 2010 like Mr Panarin predicts? Probably not. He's probably just a nutjob. After all, the idea that a fractured United States would come under foreign influence is a bit implausible (especially the idea that the heavily armed part which includes Texas and Florida would come under the sway of Mexico; individual Texans are probably better armed collectively than the Mexican army, to say nothing of the Texas national guard; on balance, I'd say the Republic of Texas attacking Mexico is far likelier). And Canada absorbing the north-central states seems equally a bit ridiculous; no matter how goofy Michiganders are, something like 80% of them are rifle-toting deer hunters who would probably respond rather vigourously if the Mounties started streaming across the Ambassador Bridge.
America's day in the sun will likely end eventually. But I would much prefer it if most of its wounds were not self-inflicted by the capricious self-indulgence of our political classes and the pie-eyed democrats who elect them to rule benevolently over us.
12/20/2008
George Lucas, military genius
A couple weeks ago the first Star Wars was on Spike or something and I couldn't help but watch it. I'm talking about episode IV, "A New Hope," naturally, not the JarJar abomination.
I've seen this movie countless times. I don't remember whether I saw it in the theater, and I would have been about seven or something when it came out, so I probably wouldn't remember it anyway. But I remember it was a weird Tulip Craze type of obsession to talk about how many times one had seen it, and people would claim the most outrageous and financially unlikely things, like "I've seen it in the theater six thousand seventeen times," etc. My main recollection of it was that it aired on television in 1983 during the buildup toward what at the time was called Revenge of the Jedi (which I still call it to this day, since that was how I was introduced to it and it stuck).
So we recorded it on VHS from over-the-air, antenna-received broadcast, awesome commercials and all (I remember one particularly stupid one of a Mercury Cougar following people around for no clear reason but to remind them how Awesome it would be if they would buy a Mercury Cougar, and a bunch of Diet Pepsi ads where they basically refused to actually show the people doing the talking). My brother and I watched our VHS tape on a solid steel VCR which was almost as big as the 19" TV we were watching on, almost every day after school for about a year, just so we could increase our watch count. It was a preposterous waste of time, but fun nonetheless, and I grew up convinced that Star Wars was among the greatest cinematic achievements of all time (after the Indiana Jones movies, of course).
The general and acknowledged awesomeness of the movie notwithstanding, we always sort of winced at a lot of the dogfight-in-the-trench scene at the end, despite being kids and all. Among the reasons:
1. Gold Leader seemed really pompous and amused by his own dialog, in a Max Headroom kind of way. We always hated Gold Leader.
2. Gold Five sounded really dorky when he kept flatly insisting, in his angry monotone that Gold Leader "stay on target," prompting even the notorious tightass Gold Leader to tell him to "loosen up."
3. Gold Two just looked like a dork. His lips were like really fat and stuff. I had a hard time buying into him as a fighter pilot.
4. Y-wing fighters were also like really gay overall.
5. When Luke Skywalker switches off his targeting computer, his ground commander says "Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?" and Luke replies "Nothing, I'm all right," and no one decides that that non-explanation warrants any follow-up questions when some cornshucking sucker of a rookie pilot decides I'M GOIN' TO MANUAL right before an all-or-nothing weapons launch.
There were other reasons, but Indiana Jones flying in out of the sun and blowing the crap out of everyone with his lasers went a long way toward making up for the rest of this nonsense as far as my 1983 VHS-watching bad self was concerned.
What struck me when I watched this last week was how stupid all this scene was. They managed to get two three-fighter groups into the trench at different times, and both attempts played out mostly the same: one guy appointed as the only one who would take the shot, and the other two guys fly around behind him offering helpful suggestions ("stay on target") and getting shot down by tie fighters that got on their six, while attempting no evasive maneuvers of any kind. When Red Two gets hit and Luke instructs him "get out of there, you can't do any more good back there," I must say I have no idea what good he supposedly was doing before he got his dumb self hit. And Red Leader sounded altogether surprised when he said "they came at us from behind!" Do tell. And really, Indiana Jones is the only one who has his act together in this scene, flying in from above and catching Darth Vader too busy using the Force to even bother to check his instruments and notice a slow-moving freighter bearing down on him from above.
Then I noticed that the fat guy's name was actually "Porkins." You read that right. Good times.
I resumed making fun of the whole Gold Squadron of doofuses and suddenly became curious if any of these yahoos had ever acted again, or if the horrible weight of their collective sordid history as Gold Squadron had ruined their acting careers. Turns out Gold Leader was played buy a guy named Angus MacInnes, who has five dozen movie credits to his name after Star Wars and owns a pizza shop in Edinborough. Had I known that in 2005 when I was in Edinborough you can bet your sweet britches I would have popped in for a pie and reminded him to "stay on target."
Speaking of "stay on target," Gold Five (Graham Ashley) had already been dead four years when I started making fun of him. I feel kinda bad about that in retrospect, but kids can be so terrible. Gold Two (Jeremy Sinden) died in 1996, which also is sad and made me regret making fun of his character as a kid. Red Leader (Drewe Henley) more or less never acted again (one could argue the same is mostly true of Red Five). Porkins himself (William Hootkins) passed away in 2005, though not before becoming better known to Freebird as a character called U.S. Translator in the 2004 episode "Impact Winter" of the greatest television program (nay, the greatest fictional creation) since the days of Sophocles.
Not only did George Lucas create a movie with a climactic scene so militarily implausible as to invite doubt on the part of a 12-year old, but it seems like he singlehandedly ruined a bunch of careers too. The moral here, if there is one, is probably that it's not a good idea to become obsessed with an entertainment program, be it Star Wars or West Wing, because then you'll either waste all your money on boxed DVD sets of a crap television program or you'll waste all your time finding links to the personal back story of incidental characters on the sadly obsessive wookipedia.org just so you can populate your blog with them as you write three-decade-late critiques of thinly veiled francophilic explorations of the noblesse resiste during the Nazi occupation instead of doing honest work. Either way, it's just kinda sad.
Also, don't make fun of people, or you might one day regret it.
Tomorrow! The auto bailout? Or Al Gore's new pantaloons? Either way, you'll not want to miss it.
And the answer is...
The two worst Amendments to our otherwise excellent Constitution came rapidfire under the deranged tutelage of Woodrow Wilson and WH Taft, no matter how much I'd rather blame the whole thing on Wilson. These are the 16th and 17th: the 17th rendered the Federal government immune from influence by the states, and the 16th gave them so much money that this immunity was certain to be abused. And, a century later, Ted "Chappaquidick" Kennedy remains a senator and his relative--I don't know and can't be bothered to look up what the relation is, as if it matters--Caroline, is about to become a deserving recipient of Hillary's old seat. And so it goes.
And, it must be admitted, both these ingenious (and disingenuous) naked power grabs came with solid Republican majorities in the senate, so the party of small government was as prone to flipping out back then as it has been the last eight years.
The third worst one I selected sort of for fun and was the 18th. I selected it mainly because I like booze and the idea of outlawing it by writing such a ban into the Constitution (which, think about it, we don't do now even for really bad stuff like heroin or tofu or Al Gore blowup dolls) strikes me as both utterly mad and also as a perfect example of what happens when democrats take sole posession of Congress and decide to write amendments.
Effin booze-hating democrats. And now they hate tobacco just as much, but are too drunk on the power and money which its taxes convey to actually have the courage (not to say honesty or integrity) to outright ban the stuff. And the party which has a crush on the idea of letting everyone smoke pot all the time (sorry, just for rigorously regulated and controlled "medical" use) thinks smoking pot is great but smoking cigarettes make you the devil--or just a devilishly handsome and wicked smart democrat president-elect, I guess.
I kid.
And, it must be admitted, both these ingenious (and disingenuous) naked power grabs came with solid Republican majorities in the senate, so the party of small government was as prone to flipping out back then as it has been the last eight years.
The third worst one I selected sort of for fun and was the 18th. I selected it mainly because I like booze and the idea of outlawing it by writing such a ban into the Constitution (which, think about it, we don't do now even for really bad stuff like heroin or tofu or Al Gore blowup dolls) strikes me as both utterly mad and also as a perfect example of what happens when democrats take sole posession of Congress and decide to write amendments.
Effin booze-hating democrats. And now they hate tobacco just as much, but are too drunk on the power and money which its taxes convey to actually have the courage (not to say honesty or integrity) to outright ban the stuff. And the party which has a crush on the idea of letting everyone smoke pot all the time (sorry, just for rigorously regulated and controlled "medical" use) thinks smoking pot is great but smoking cigarettes make you the devil--or just a devilishly handsome and wicked smart democrat president-elect, I guess.
I kid.
12/13/2008
Mmm, card check. I got yer card check right here.
So some rabble rousers at a North Carolina meat packing plant have finally succeeded in imposing their will on their co-workers and their employer.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, which had lost unionization elections at the 5,000-worker plant in 1994 and 1997, announced late Thursday that it had finally won. The victory was significant in a region known for hostility toward organized labor.
That the unionizing idea was voted down in 1994 and again in 1997 and was even being voted on again shows that unions never take no for an answer. Imagine the implications for this point under a card check regime, which we'll return to shortly.
The vote was one of the biggest private-sector union successes in years, and officials from the United Food and Commercial Workers said it was the largest in that union’s history.
Congratulations, now you can get in line behind General Motors in driving your employer into the ground as the price of your product rises due to higher labor costs and restrictive work rules, with no commensurate increase in product quality. As a consumer, I sure can't wait to pay more than I'm accustomed to for the same quality product I've always enjoyed from Smithfield. As a consumer, what's in it for me to pay more for a product that's of no higher quality?
Smithfield's competitors are probably celebrating as much as the pro-union thugs are today.
“It feels great,” said Ms. Blue, who makes $11.90 an hour and has worked at Smithfield for five years. “It’s like how Obama felt when he won. We made history.”
“I favored the union because of respect,” said Ms. Blue, who is black. “We deserve more respect than we’re getting. When we were hurt or sick, we weren’t getting treated like we should.”
Sigh. The "respect" canard. Pass.
Many unions are pushing Congress to pass legislation that would enable unions to organize workers by having them sign pro-union cards. “I would say in this case, it shows that the union can win without a card check,” [company spokesman Dennis] Pittman said.But [union thug Joe] Hansen said the 15-year unionization fight showed how hard it was to win under the normal system.
I'd say the 15-year unionization fight shows that pro-union agitants are something of a cancer to a workforce insofar as they never can really be cleared out, no matter how many votes against unionizing you record.
Imagine the glorious world that awaits us if card check passes. If the first round of canvassing for signatures indicates any support whatsoever, union petitioners (not to say thugs) will be able to simply revisit all those who had previously turned them down and ask again for a signature.
And again. And again. And yet again, with more, ah, "feeling." And again in the parking lot at night on the way to your car. And perhaps again at your house some quiet evening at home. Why not? What's their incentive not to do this?
So congratulations to the union agitants at Smithfield. If there's one thing union propaganda teaches us, it's that even if the economy is crumbling around us, anti-competitive measures to effectively outlaw layoffs can still guarantee our jobs, salaries and rich benefits. Until the company dies.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
