Tag: bailouts

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Rescue Them

“Ideas are forces: the existence of one determines our reception of others.”

This is more than just a statement of associationist psychology.

Take the politics of “welfare.” The modern project has placed government at the heart of society, construing its basic mission as that of “rescuing” people who make mistakes or suffer ill fortune. Taking over where self-help, mutual aid, and charity left off — and at the risk of squelching self-help, mutual aid, and charity — government steps in and provides assistance. Often permanent assistance, and within the context of vast bureaucracies and inescapable institutions.

The socialists who most insist on this messianic government seem to be mostly driven by a concern for the poor . . . and a hatred for the rich. (Sometimes both, sometimes just one or the other.) But the Progressives and New Dealers who actually established the institutions of “welfare” didn’t stop with just the poor. Once the Rescue Mission mentality stuck, there was no class that “shouldn’t” receive benefits.

The result? We watch anti-corporate leftists squirm as they defend corporate bailouts.

But not all left-leaning folks buy the whole package. In America and Europe high-level panic led to vast fortunes squandered to bail out banks, etc. But in Iceland, the people let the creditors take their lumps and the banks fail while drastically cutting back on government deficits (though not targeting assistance for the poor).

That is, they behaved more like laissez faire economists than messianic technocrats.

And Iceland’s thriving, bounced back.

Of course, true believers in the awesome powers of government will resist any notion that bailouts aren’t necessary . . . ideas being forces and all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
national politics & policies responsibility

A Loan of Common Sense

If you give something that belongs to you, without expecting to get it back, that’s giving. You just hand over a gift and forget about it. Perhaps you would appreciate a “thank you.”

If you lend to someone, you expect to be repaid. Those who don’t repay are called deadbeats.

If you mug somebody on the street and grab his wallet, you are stealing. You are then a thief, a robber.

That’s all straightforward enough. This is not: Say that you steal from the productive citizens of one country or countries (Country or Countries A) and give the dough to the fiscally irresponsible government of another country (Country B), and you call it a loan. But when Country B can’t pay the installments, it is provided another loan originating in the wallets of the very same Country A citizens from whom was extracted the original loan.

What is this? You are not only stealing, you are shuffling IOUs instead of getting repaid. You are also misrepresenting the nature of the transactions, for it is clearly a gift of stolen money and not anything voluntary, like a loan.

Bill Wilson, President of Americans for Limited Government, goes into a bit more of the nitty and gritty of Greece’s tricky tranche of “repayment” on its “loan” from the European Union, and relates it to the similar finagling here in the United States . . . which all rests on credit expansion by the Federal Reserve. “The eggheads in Washington, D.C.,” he says, offer only one solution: “just keep digging.”

But how deep? At some point it gets too hot down there.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies

A $13 Billion Reward

The Federal Reserve, our central bank, hit the news big last week.

Beginning in August 2007 and continuing for the next two and a half years, the Fed lent the world’s biggest banks something like $7.77 trillion dollars at the barely perceptible interest rate of 0.01 percent. With that money, the banks bought Treasury bonds (federal debt) and made $13 billion in profit.

I reported on this multi-trillion-dollar loan figure in December 2008, a few weeks after the biggest day ever of Fed bailout fever. For some reason this information didn’t become widespread or understood until this December, when Judge Andrew Napolitano and Jon Stewart made a big deal of it on their respective TV shows, after Bloomberg reported the profits banks made off all that bailout money.

What does this figure represent? To me, it represents the outrageous amount of magic money a sick and corrupt fiat-dollar/bailout-based system of moral hazard requires when it implodes.

I think we can all justifiably roll our eyes, now, when some rah-rah boy for big government tells us how absolutely necessary it is to have a central bank. The old gold standard never fell apart this badly. The gold requirement itself placed a huge check on out-of-control banking.

But a $13 billion reward for the biggest financial mess in world history? That’s the very opposite of a check or balance on risk-taking, greed, or downright stupidity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets too much government

Saab Stories

Saab Automobile appears to be going down. The Swedish automaker was abandoned by its beleaguered parent company, General Motors, prompting the Swedish managers to petition the Swedish government for a bailout. In 2009, the Scandinavian government said “No.” GM then sold Saab to a Dutch manufacturer, which hit a cash crunch in this year’s first quarter.

Lots of people with fond memories of the pre-GM Saab thought that the Dutch outfit had a great idea: Revive Saab by reintroducing a 1940s look, the famous Saab 92.

But the financing fell through, sending Saab begging, again, to the Swedish government, with promises of radical restructuring.

A western Swedish district court again ruled, “No.”

This is not good for the people of Trollhattan, where Saab’s main plants reside. They will be hard hit, as in any disaster.

What is interesting is that, though many folks of Trollhattan have repeated the old social democrat line about how they are “people” who somehow deserve their incomes and such, the government refused to go along with the old bailout model.

One could argue that the oft-idolized Swedish nationalization/capitalization/marketing solution was the model for America’s 2008 and 2009 bailouts. The method looks less popular, these days, in its home country.

We’re living in tough times, getting tougher. Still, at some point we’ve got to bite the bullet and resist trying to “fix” failed businesses by government.

Governments fail often enough, themselves, without moonlighting this extra job.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies too much government

Déjà vu Economics

Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?

Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
folly national politics & policies

Save the Unions’ Ponzi Schemes?

Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania is legislating something big, the “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act.”

Innocuous? Everyone wants more jobs. Government may have a lousy track record creating jobs that actually produce things demanded by people, but still — the bill is hardly unexpected in times like these.

It’s the second half of the title that indicates the powder keg within. The bill would bail out horrendously mismanaged union pension plans.

Unions, in the current legal context, are legal creatures of the state, with special privileges. And, surprise surprise, their own pensions — the ones that they manage — appear to be in as bad shape as the public-employee pensions I’ve talked about before, the ones that are building into a tsunami of insolvency.

A public bailout would transfer money from people without any special pension plan to people with pensions that are going bust. This is horribly unjust. That’s why Americans for Limited Government — a past sponsor of this program — is calling out Republican politicians who’ve signed onto Casey’s audacious scheme.

“At issue are multi-employer pension plans, in which companies across an industry pay into a single pension pool,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “[E]ven before 2006 only about 6% of multi-employer plans were fully funded, compared to about 31% of single-employer plans. The real problem is that multi-employer plans have become a sort of pension Ponzi scheme.”

Hmmm. Where have we heard that before?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.