“Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society.”
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Author: Redactor
Incentives work. Because people are self-interested.
Even the seemingly altruistic protagonist played by Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams exclaims, “I haven’t once asked what’s in it for me,” only to then ask, “What’s in it for me?”
That line comes to mind when I hear politicians and business folks talk about private-public partnerships, from subsidies for ethanol to billions in government loans to supposedly spur “green” technology.
The bankruptcy of the solar panel maker Solyndra cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars. But it’s not merely that government is less than stellar at picking investment winners; it’s that the interests of politicians and businesspeople aren’t “the public interest.”
Never will be.
Sure, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told Congress yesterday, “I did not make any decision based on political considerations.” But internal company emails feature complaints about pressure from the Obama Administration to delay announcing layoffs until after the 2010 elections.
Whose interest did that serve?
Documents also uncover Solyndra executives hiding bad news the better to win additional federal funds and, alternatively, threatening that the company was about to go under hoping the potential bad press for Obama might shake down additional bucks.
Companies have an interest in the big money the federal government dangles before them. Politicians have an interest in appearing to be economic wizards creating jobs and spurring a new world with bright green hues.
Neither incentive promotes sound business behavior nor equates with the public interest.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Spain 1976
On Nov. 18, 1976, Spain’s parliament approved a bill to establish a democracy after 37 years of dictatorship.
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Sir Ernest Benn
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”
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Is Congress the “One Percent”?
Splitting the country between the “99 percent” and the “1 percent” scapegoats successful people. Being rich is a good thing . . . unless the wealth is obtained dishonestly.
Which brings me to Congress.
Last Sunday, 60 Minutes featured Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out, a new book detailing what he calls “soft corruption” — unethical behavior that may not quite qualify as illegal.
Schweizer points out that members of Congress are not covered by laws against insider trading, thus legally able to “leverage” the information they receive to “enrich themselves.” At the cusp of the 2008 financial meltdown, Rep. Spencer Bacchus (R-Ala.) was receiving special briefings from the Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and “buying option funds that would go up in value if the market went down.”
Bacchus is hardly alone. During the healthcare debate, numerous congressmen traded healthcare stocks.
Then there are IPOs — initial public offerings of stock — which are usually available only to major investors. Somehow Speaker Nancy Pelosi was cut in on a least eight IPOs, including a lucrative one from VISA . . . at a time major credit card legislation was pending in the House.
None of “our” representatives deigned to openly discuss their amazing financial acumen. But as 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft confirmed, “Most former congressmen and senators manage to leave Washington, if they ever leave Washington, with more money in their pockets than they had when they arrived.”
Funny, they haven’t done nearly so well handling the country’s finances.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On Nov. 17, 1939, following student demonstrations in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Nazis executed nine students and professors, arrested and sent more than 1,000 students to concentration camps, and shut down universities. In 1989, on the 50th anniversary, student protests broke out against Soviet occupiers, touching off national strikes that soon led to the end of Soviet rule.
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Václav Havel
“I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.”
If you are like me, you are not a monetary economist. I’m familiar with the main positions, I guess, and — if I dug information buried deep in memory — might be able to sound coherent on monetary policy when asked. And if given enough time to collect my thoughts. But you wouldn’t come to me to gain specific advice on specific issues relating to the Federal Reserve and money management at the rarefied level of the central bank.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve accepted or rejected positions based on analogous realms where you know much more.
And sometimes it all depends on The CreepOut-o-Meter.
My CreepOut-o-Meter just hit red.
Britain’s Business Secretary Vince Cable was recently quoted as saying, “If a monetary deal’s going to work, the central bank has to have unlimited powers to intervene to support economies, and indeed banks, to prevent collapse.”
Did he really say, “unlimited powers”?
That’s a long way from Milton Friedman’s reserved talk about a “monetary rule.” One of the biggest of Britain’s bigwigs isn’t talking about tinkering or refining. He’s pushing for an unlimited bailiwick to bail out Europe’s banks, credit, and the euro itself.
So you can see why I tend to promote old-fashioned money, money that wasn’t intimately controlled and bolstered-by-bailouts. Money like gold. Or silver. Or a set of commodities.
With that kind of money, it’s governments that are bound, limited.
It fits better with my idea of a free society.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky
Although government for the people by a beneficent elite is a conceptual possibility, it is a highly improbable one. Elites cannot be relied on to pursue individuals’ interests with anything like the consistency and intensity that individuals themselves regularly do: Benevolent despots are considerably more likely to remain despotic than benevolent. (Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference, p. 167)
On Nov. 16, 1938, philosopher Robert Nozick was born. Nozick is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which won the National Book Award in 1975. In that book he argued that a minimal state was just, that the case for a bigger, more intrusive government (like that of the present day) is untenable, and that the minimal state, while seemingly puny by its limitations, is nevertheless morally praiseworthy and conducive to a good society. Nozick taught at Harvard, and wrote several other major works on other philosophical topics before his death in 2002.