This comedy routine from Australian television — sort of a take-off on the famous Abbott & Costello sketch “Who’s on First?” — may be more spot-on about the continuing financial crisis than it is ha-ha funny. Brew a strong cup of coffee, sit down in a very stable chair and watch:
Americans often express astonishment when they learn that many of the nation’s laws — the bulk of its “regulations” — have not been written by Congress. Though the Constitution grants to Congress alone the power to legislate, Congress cedes most of that power to Executive Branch bureaucracies.
Last Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul hosted a panel on government regulatory abuse. Covering this “round table” discussion, Lou Dobbs, the Fox anchorman, interviewed Sen. Paul, and the two highlighted a number of regulatory horror stories:
The law that’s directed against this latter family, by the way, “is about wetlands,” which, Rand Paul informs us, Congress has never enacted laws about: “‘Wetlands’ is something defined into existence by regulatory agencies.”
In The Road to Serfdom F. A. Hayek showed how undemocratic and abusive “central planning” becomes. Apparently, even without a grand, overarching plan, regulation of the micro-managing kind navigates the same path.
Demand more “regulation”? Expect arbitrary judgment and unreasonable requirements — tyranny — as the result.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
The “Occupy Wall Street” protestors seem, mostly, to be against rich people.
But it’s not wealth as such that sparked the protests, is it? The ranks of the self-proclaimed 99-percenters may be filled with miseducated anti-capitalists, but the occasion of their ire seems fairly clear:
So of course folks protest.
Too bad they have barely two clues to rub together.
The general cluelessness does not end at the overflowing toilets and excrement-stained police vehicles. When the protests went global, the New York Times reported on the “thousands of people marching past ancient monuments and gathering in front of capitalist symbols like the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.”
Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute expressed his incredulity:
A government-created institution that creates a government-issued paper currency that is a shabby piece of paper thanks to government intervention in order to bail out government-subsidized and government-sustained institutions. And they call this a capitalist symbol?
Obviously, “capitalism” today means “state capitalism” or “crony capitalism,” not laissez-faire. That some folks still think we live in a “free market” — and blame everything now not working on that system — demonstrates the need for careful distinctions from those of us who know better.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
A friend of mine shared something Desire Street Ministries had posted to Facebook:
We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.
Mother Teresa said that. It’s not something you’re likely to hear from the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors. From what I’ve heard, they tend to say that people are in poverty because of big, greedy corporations . . . or government not taking care of them. Mother Teresa was closer to a better explanation. After all, those of us eating and sleeping well weren’t handed bread and a front door key by the government or a corporation.
A deeper poverty lurks behind persistent financial poverty. Sometimes the problem is neglect or abuse, drug addiction or alcoholism. Love can conquer all, but the Department of Social Services and the DEA don’t dispense love very effectively.
My Facebook friend commented, “Non-profits do so much better of a job of helping the poor than big government can/will do.”
Why is that? It isn’t because social workers don’t care. It’s that government bureaucracies are ill-equipped to address individual needs, which go far beyond a bowl of soup and a bed or even a monthly check.
More training, regulations and new laws are hardly the solution.
We are the solution. But we won’t be if we hand the task to government and declare “I gave at the IRS.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
In one way, President Obama has had it hard: He inherited a mess.
In another, he has had it easy: His predecessor blew it big time.
As James Bovard put it in his 2004 book, The Bush Betrayal, “George W. Bush came to the presidency promising prosperity, peace, and humility. Instead, Bush . . . spawned record federal budget deficits, launched an unnecessary war, and made America the most hated nation in the world.”
The election of Obama turned foreign opinion around, but his actual policies have proved no advance over his predecessor’s.
Bush started the bailouts; Obama bailed out more.
Bush pushed through an under-funded entitlement, Medicare Part D. Obama leveraged his political capital to take an even bigger step towards socialized medicine.
Bush understandably undertook the Afghanistan venture — but the Iraq conquest and reconstruction betrayed his promise to forswear “nation-building.” Then Obama lingered in Iraq, upped the forces in Afghanistan — long after the rationale became murky — and also attacked a number of other countries, including Libya. So much for the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
But when it comes to America’s misguided War on Drugs, Obama has been especially disappointing. No-one really expected much of Bush. But Obama? He said he’d reverse policy at least vis-à-vis the states that voted in medical marijuana. Yet federal agents continue targeting medical marijuana growers.
We aren’t being served well by the presidents we spend so much time thinking about.
Could it be because they don’t really think much about us?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
More than one person forecast the bursting of the Dot Com Bubble, twelve years ago. The Pets.com sock puppet wasn’t the only clue — the general enthusiasm for companies that had never, ever shown a profit proved signal enough. And then there was all the talk about how the stock market “could only go up.”
Soon after, it went down.
Then stocks rose again, in a Fed-induced bubble. And then collapsed again, along with the financial system.
Brace yourself for another rerun.
The Economist informs us that “European bankers have been saying things are fine for weeks now, even as their exposure to indebted euro-zone countries strangles their access to funding. . . . Fears of contagion from Europe have now infected America.”
The gloom and doom just rises from there.
The article is depressing for another reason, though — the assumption that governments must not let banks fail, making The Economist read like council for never-ending tax-funded bailouts. Which was the kind of thing actual economists used to warn governments against. (A long time ago . . . perhaps back when the science was called “political economy.”)
Times sure have changed, as The Economist admits. The three years since 2008 have made a difference: Now it is the governments that prove insolvent.
It’s time for The Economist to rethink its policy advice, time to call for a general overhaul of the international monetary system.
We must end the age of inflation-and-bailouts, before it ends us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
I don’t know about you, but when I want to invest my money, I don’t go the Department of Energy for advice.
There’s a reason for this. At their best, bureaucracies “lumber on,” to quote one sociologist’s analysis. They are, “by their nature . . . fitted only for average requirements.” Picking long shots? Not their strong suit.
And a long shot is what the government’s investment in Solyndra surely was. The more emails that are released, the more obvious this becomes. Even savvy folks within the administration knew was that Solyndra was a bad deal.
Yet President Obama says it seemed like a “good bet” at the time.
Why?
Politics. He needed to look good, and the easiest garb to grab was the garb of “green.”
That is, alternative energy — which is said to be our future. Undoubtedly some alternatives will dominate . . . that is, ones found on the market. The great gales of destructive creation that is the market process will eventually solve our “energy problem” . . . if only to create a new problem, requiring yet another solution. (In real life, there are rarely “solutions,” only trade-offs.)
There is something obscene in Obama’s “good bet,” for he was betting with other people’s money. Confiscated money.
At the very least, such funds must be treated carefully, not gambled.
To spend otherwise is to sully, for temporary gain, a sacred trust.
Of course, Americans are so used to such trust being desecrated that, sadly, the Solyndra scandal doesn’t quite seem like the enormity it truly is.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
There’s way too much pressure on politicians to “do something.” Most of the things they can do are bad. “Do something” too easily translates to “do anything,” and odds are that “anything” will end up as catastrophe.
There’s a division of labor in doing things: Investors, capitalists, and entrepreneurs create businesses which employ people; legislators and government executives have the more humble task of setting up and refining the groundrules, allowing others to do the great works.
Politicians don’t create jobs as such.
Few politicians understands this. But Gary Johnson, former two-term governor of New Mexico, does — and he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination.
“The fact is,” he said in the recent debate, “I can unequivocally say that I did not create a single job while I was governor.” He went on to say how proud he was of this fact. New Mexico underwent an “11.6 percent job growth” rate during his two terms. All he did was get government out of the way of businesses.
Now, I understand: The “politician as jobs creator” talk is sometimes just a way to focus attention on getting policy right. National Review Online called Johnson “the best job creator” of all the candidates. The august journal didn’t mean much by it, other than note the statistic.
But too often politicians decide they can create jobs by taking money from all of us in taxes and investing it in private companies or new government programs. Those politicians aren’t creating jobs for us, but doing a job on us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Retail sales taxation became vogue among the states of the union during the Great Depression. When other revenue sources dried up, many states decided to nab potential taxpayers at each transaction.
We’re in a depression again, and numerous legislatures are looking to expand their retail sales tax base by targeting out-of-state Internet purchases.
California has made the biggest stink about this, and its fight with Amazon.com has been in the headlines for some time. Though the issue has been put “on hold” for a year, the Assembly’s rapacity has produced at least one effect. It has driven many online businesses out of the state, and severely curtailed the online sales of many California brick-and-mortar concerns.
Take Shopobot, a new online business. One of this San Francisco company’s biggest revenue streams was Amazon. And Amazon dropped it like a hot rock.
So what did Shopobot do? It fled California for the cooler Seattle, Washington.
Why skip Oregon — which lacks a retail sales tax? My guess is that Oregon’s political environment struck the Shopobot folks as nearly as crazy as California’s, so heading further north made more sense, to sit beside Amazon itself, and across Lake Union from Adobe’s compound, er, “campus.”
The online sales tax question is widely perceived as a problem. The only solution, I guess, is to let Congress do its constitutional duty and “regulate interstate commerce.”
Amazon sure wants that.
But why am I not optimistic about a good solution?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
“We shouldn’t have to leave our country to have a reasonable health care system,” says Eric O’Keefe, chair of the Health Care Compact Alliance.
I agree, but what to do with Obamacare, at present secure from repeal?
O’Keefe points out that Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution permits states to enter into compacts with one another provided they get congressional approval. States have done so since colonial times; there are currently 200 state compacts in force dealing with issues from driver’s licensing to wildlife.
The Health Care Compact would allow states to “get rid of all of Obamacare,” and to tell the federal government, as O’Keefe puts it, “You keep your regulations; send us back our money.”
“It’s not just a way to block Obamacare,” O’Keefe explains. “It includes Medicare and Medicaid, creates a block grant of all the money and it goes into the compacting states for them to manage as they see fit. So the citizens and the legislature will work it out in their state.”
States that join the compact could set up their own health care system with the money they currently receive from the federal government, sans regulations and mandates. While some states might experiment with single-payer systems, others could expand medical savings accounts and other market-oriented reforms.
Georgia, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas have already passed the Health Care Compact, and will likely apply for congressional approval once a dozen or more states join.
Who’s next?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.