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 The Unintended Successes of Big Government
By Tom Purcell
Some folks worry that our government is getting too big. I worry that it won't get big enough.
Maybe I better explain.
The era of limited government is long gone in America -- especially if the birds currently running the joint have their way.
I figure if we can't beat them, we may as well join them.
Sure, I'm aware of the law of unintended consequences -- that government programs frequently achieve the opposite of their stated intent.
Take poverty. LBJ unleashed a flurry of government programs to eliminate it. The way he went about it, though, encouraged more people to be dependent -- and poor.
Take ethanol. It is an alcohol made, mostly, from corn. Corn used to be bountiful and cheap -- until the government began subsidizing ethanol, which perverted the corn market, which caused food costs to soar, which caused riots in the poorer parts of the world.
Take the housing bubble. The government decided people without good credit or steady incomes should have mortgages, too. Congress made Fannie and Freddie, quasi-government organizations, buy the risky loans these folks took out.
Such government meddling perverted the marketplace. The twits on Wall Street exploited the perverted incentives for short-term gain -- until the bubble burst and the economy exploded, and now, all of us are in a world of hurt.
I'm fully aware of the damage big government can do -- fully aware of the unintended consequences of big-government programs. Which is how I arrived at a master strategy to make big government work for us.
It would appear that President Obama and his team aren't fully sure how to unfreeze the credit markets. I offer a perfect big-government solution:
Obama needs to establish a new presidential task force whose mission is to further freeze credit markets. We'll give the group a $1 trillion budget to spend any way it sees fit to reduce economic output, increase unemployment, cause more bankruptcies and so on.
I'm confident the markets will thaw and the economy will boom inside of six months.
Once we get our first "unintended success" under our belts, we can begin picking off the other challenges our country faces, such as global warming.
Now I know the debate is not settled on whether man is causing the Earth to warm, but I have a novel idea to reduce the use of fossil fuels, anyhow: appoint Rep. Barney Frank to lead another government panel whose task is to dramatically increase the output of CO2.
Surely Frank will be as effective at that task as he was at protecting Fannie and Freddie, which he made buy the risky loans that turbocharged the rickety housing bubble.
I'm confident America will see a bigger reduction in CO2 emissions than we saw, as our plants were shuttered, during the other Depression.
By this point, Americans will start believing in big government again. That will give us a chance to finally attack poverty the right way.
We can appoint Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to head a new agency whose task is to grow poverty and create dependency. We won't mind spending another $1 trillion, though, because Pelosi will cause welfare rolls to drop faster than my 401(k).
That success will really bolster the spirit of the American people. Americans will be eager for big government to tackle a host of other matters.
Health costs soaring? We'll appoint a government task force to drive them up further.
Too many people in jail? We'll appoint a government task force to encourage theft, drug use and violent crime.
Too many out-of-wedlock births? We'll appoint another government task force to double the number.
As our successes mount, there will be no problem our big government solutions cannot fix.
All we need is a leader who is courageous enough to do what is really needed -- a leader who believes in big government and is willing to spend like no president has ever spent before him.
I think we finally found our guy.
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Michael Reagan, 3/25/2009 [Archive]
Don’t Get Angry, Get Even
When the members of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) wanted to use anger as a political weapon they burned the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists.
It’s an old tactic -- when you are in trouble, create a crisis and then create a straw man to blame for the crisis. We are now seeing it played out as a giant insurance company, AIG, is given the role of straw man.
It’s working. I’m mad, you’re mad, and our anger over the mess created by Washington politicians and their Wall Street buddies is now being diverted away from Capitol Hill and toward AIG and a handful of executives, some of whom got huge bonuses as their company was being bailed out by the federal government.
In the entire furor, nobody has bothered to ask for the details behind the bonuses, such as why were they given to some AIG employees and whether they were legitimate and deserved.
One of them, Jake DeSantis, who like AIG’s CEO Edward Liddy has been donating his services for the princely sum of one dollar a year, sent a letter of resignation to Liddy which was published as an editorial in The New York Times Wednesday.
DeSantis explained what he had done to earn his nearly $800,000 bonus. “Like you [Liddy], I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.”
He might have added that he is now being rewarded by having members of Congress -- the body largely responsible for the financial crisis -- aim the public’s anger not at Congress itself, where it belongs, but at him and his fellow AIG employees.
Noting that AIG’s equity and commodity units which he headed were consistently profitable, generating net profits of well over $100 million, DeSantis wrote, “during the dismantling of AIG-FP, I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to AIG’s effort to repay the American taxpayer.
“The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation,” he wrote, adding that he was donating his entire bonus -- nearly $800,000 -- “to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn.”
That’s the side of the story the media and the sanctimonious members of Congress haven’t bothered to tell the American people because they don’t dare. If they did the anger might be directed at them, where the blame lies.
Congressmen have a tendency to react, and we, unfortunately, tend to over-react with them because that’s what we do when we are mad. The problem with anger is when you are mad you make terrible decisions.
When you are angry at your children you say and do things you’d never do or say when you aren’t mad. Ditto with your spouse. The fact is, you can’t make sensible decisions when you are on fire.
That’s what’s going on here. You have a government and a slavishly subservient media pointing the finger of blame at AIG. As a result, spurred on by duplicitous members of Congress and their media stooges, you are enraged at AIG and their bonus recipients such as Jake DeSantis, and not at such miscreants as Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, who were among the real villains behind the financial meltdown.
Lost in the shuffle is the fact that it was Dodd who wrote the legislation that required AIG to pay the disputed bonuses in the first place.
As a result of your anger, you are willing to allow Dodd and Frank and their congressional colleagues and President Obama to burn down AIG and slander some of their executives when the blame lies elsewhere, on Capitol Hill and at the White House.
Don’t get mad, folks, get even.
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2WakeUp
...Your federal, state and local representatives is a very easy process and can be done right here in just a few minutes. On the left side of this page are links to your representatives no matter where you live in the USA. When you click on the federal, state or local link you will be guided to the site that will give you address, email and telephone for your representative at what ever level you click. It takes but a moment and you will be contributing to the future of your country. Remember, when you vote for a person to fill a political position no matter what level, that person is a public servant and you are the public. You pay their salary and they are obligated to listen to you. If any person is voted into office today, any office, they believe that you agree with their policy and they go forward with their agenda. The reason they assume this is that you do nothing after voting them into office. Every week you stop at the water cooler to talk about the politician that you do not agree with but never speak to the person. It is time for all of us to step up to the plate - to walk the walk and write or email, not once but once a week. One of the most pressing bills before your legislators today has to do with immigration and if you do not take a stand and be heard now there will be amnesty for millions of illegals and millions more will cross our borders knowing that nothing will ever be done to stop them or to return them to their native country. It can not be that difficult to take time to be a part of this countries future, your future,and the future of you children or grandchildren.
Patrick Gillespie 10 March 2005
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 Will Durst, 3/6/2009 [Archive]
Bye American
Raging Moderate, by Will Durst
Can we stop with the waving of the sharp instruments for a minute and speak rationally to this whole ugly recession mess we find ourselves currently mired in? C’mon. You know what recession mess I’m talking about. You’re packing a bag lunch and taking mass transit to visit the public library to use their ancient computer to check out the job classifieds on Craigslist for crum’s sake. Yeah, THAT recession mess. Well, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve positively identified the bad guys responsible for this meltdown, and they end up having awfully familiar faces.
Go ahead. Guess who’s to blame? No, not the subprime mortgage brokers or Bernie Madoff and his ilk or those reverse Robin Hood hedge-fund speculators throwing trillions of dollars worth of derivatives around like paper towels at a chili cheese dog-eating competition. Nope. The dastardly bums that created the worldwide financial crisis is… us. That’s right. You and me. And I hope we’re happy.
For making former Silicon Valley start-up CFOs toil as Indian-casino valets. For driving down the price of 2-year-old Porsche Boxters to the level of a ‘96 Taurus with a blown head gasket. For forcing casseroles and meatloaf onto the menus of 3-star Michelin chefs. It’s all our fault. And how are we doing it? By not buying enough stuff. Damn us anyway. How dare we?
Who cares whether we’re employed or not? Don’t we realize we are the pistons that drive the free market engine? It’s our God-given patriotic duty to go out there and buy stuff we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. We don’t do easy. We do compulsory.
Remember how good it felt to buy that brand-new DVD we had no intention of ever watching? Aren’t you just itching to tear the shrink-wrap off of something with your teeth right now? Anybody can conspicuously consume when things are going well and money geysers from the ground like it did between the Bushes. It takes a true retail soldier to run up credit card bills when banks are raising interest rates so high, it would not be off the mark for them to utilize a dorsal fin as a logo.
I wouldn’t get this squishy if I wasn’t seeing pubescent girls get punched in the gut with our selfish frugality. Girl Scout Cookie sales have sunk to levels not seen since Jimmy Carter was scolding us while wearing cardigans. The Girl Scouts! Okay, that’s it. I don’t know which of you commie pinko yellow rat cretinous toads managed to hypnotize the rest of us into believing we’re so broke we can’t afford a couple of measly packages of Thin Mints, but you’ve gone too far. You fiend. How soon before we take out our parsimonious wrath on the innocent producers of Sham-Wow and Snuggie?
Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you; open your wallets. Ask yourself, “What would Paris Hilton do?” It doesn’t matter what you buy. A Jonas Brothers lunch box. A $75 grass-fed, hand-massaged, Kobe beef porterhouse steak, bathed in boysenberry-infused truffle butter. A 96-piece Limited Edition Pewter Napkin Ring Set in the shape of the characters from the Lord of the Rings. Ford. Besides, this isn’t about you and me people. This isn’t about America. This isn’t about Detroit. This is about the Girl Scouts. |
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