"Obama compares housing crisis to Great Depression" Reuters:
"Obama said the U.S. housing crisis resulted from a lack of regulation of mortgage lenders and investment banks who ended up with worthless assets, leading people to panic.
'As your president my job is to regulate what happens in the financial markets to make sure that people aren't taking these kinds of risks and that we're having full disclosure,' he said.
'If we do that then I think we can feel pretty confident we're going to avoid a depression.'"
The Audacity of Arrogance. I'd like him to show me in the constitution where it says the president's job is to "regulate what happens in the financial markets". I'd like to add that if "we" don't "do that then I think we can feel pretty confident we're going to avoid a depression".
This leads me to this...
"The Cult of the Presidency" by Gene Healy for Reason (HT: Radley Balko):
"To understand is not to excuse: No president should have the powers President Bush has sought and seized during the last seven years. But after 9/11 and Katrina, what rationally self-interested chief executive would hesitate to centralize power in anticipation of crisis? That pressure would be hard to resist, even for a president devoted to the Constitution and respectful of the limited role the office was supposed to play in our system of government.In the current presidential race, none of the major-party candidates comes close to fitting that description. Aside from the issue of torture, there’s very little daylight between John McCain and George W. Bush on matters of executive power. For her part, Hillary Clinton claims she played a key role in her husband’s undeclared war against Serbia in 1999. “I urged him to bomb,” she told Talk magazine that year. In 2003 she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “I’m a strong believer in executive authority. I wish that, when my husband was president, people in Congress had been more willing to recognize presidential authority.”
Barack Obama has done more than any candidate in memory to boost expectations for the office, which were extraordinarily high to begin with. Obama’s stated positions on civil liberties may be preferable to McCain’s, but would it matter? If and when a car bomb goes off somewhere in America, would a President Obama be able to resist resorting to warrantless wiretapping, undeclared wars, and the Bush theory of unrestrained executive power? As a Democrat without military experience, publicly perceived as weak on national security, he’d have much more to prove...
Our system, with its unhealthy, unconstitutional concentration of power, feeds on the atavistic tendency to see the chief magistrate as our national father or mother, responsible for our economic well-being, our physical safety, and even our sense of belonging. Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making. One hopes that it won’t take another Watergate and Vietnam for us to break loose from the spellbinding cult of the presidency."
A long, but very interesting article. For me, I have to vote for the one who I think will inflict the least damage.
"Peace and Free Trade" by Don Boudreaux:
"[A] vital course is for Uncle Sam to immediately eliminate all trade and investment restrictions with China, and for politicians to stop threatening further restrictions. Such moves would speed the integration of China's economy with our own. Being economically integrated means being economically reliant on each other - a happy recipe for prosperity and peace.
Want evidence?...Ask yourself how likely are even a well-armed Canada or Japan to have any interest in shooting their countless customers and suppliers throughout the U.S.? The answer, of course, is no more likely than we are to want to shoot our customers and suppliers throughout those countries."
"Getting the right picture" by Don Boudreaux for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (HT: Don Boudreaux):
"[O]ne of the most common of these "interpretation differences" involves labor and jobs. When I write, as I do in the previous paragraph, of "scarce domestic labor," many readers will wonder what I'm talking about. These readers see labor as expendable, as resources not especially valuable. Think about it. The overwhelming objection to imports is that the domestic workers whom they displace are unlikely ever again to find employment at wages close to those that they once earned in their now-defunct jobs. This objection rests on the presumption that these workers were overpaid in their former jobs...
When freer trade eliminates some jobs, it releases labor and capital to produce things that previously were too costly to produce. The result: Consumers eventually get not only the imports, but also the additional domestic production made possible by those imports. Also, these domestic resources become more productively employed because competition shifts them from less-productive to more-productive enterprises and industries. The snapshot perspective of trade skeptics causes them to miss these future benefits."
"Prevention is Better than Cure: More on That Veto Override" by Sallie James with Cato:
"An article in today’s The Hill notes:
'[L]obbyists said members were being told to “vote their districts,” meaning they could support the measure without fearing any consequence from leadership.'
What’s worse is that the bill probably could have been improved upon, much earlier in the process. The Republican leadership has full discretion over committee assignments. Instead of seating on the Agriculture Committee a balanced array of viewpoints, the House GOP leadership has chosen a collection of members that hail almost universally from farm-heavy districts and are greatly predisposed to support an increase in agricultural spending."
When I read/listened to Master of the Senate, I remember a part when Hubert Humphrey begged LBJ to let him be on the Ag committee because his constituents expected it. Having all congressmen and women from farming districts on the Ag committee stacks the deck in their favor, allowing them to pay off their special interests in a way that keeps them in power. It's rigged in favor of incumbents.
"Credit where it's due" by Janet Albrechtsen for The Austrialian (HT: Real Clear Politics):
"The resentment that comes from needing the military and economic might of the US translated into the most absurd criticism. Jan Egeland, the former UN boss of humanitarian affairs, cavilled about the stinginess of certain Western nations. His eye was on the US. Former British minister Claire Short was equally miffed, describing the initiative by the US and other countries as "yet another attempt to undermine the UN", which was, according to her, the "only body that has the moral authority" to help.
I love moral authority as much as the next guy, but the UN's moral authority is a mighty hard sell...
The need to paint Americans as a greedy, selfish, war-mongering superpower cannot be disturbed by facts. It matters not that, in the year before the tsunami, the US provided $2.4 billion in humanitarian relief: 40per cent of all the relief aid given to the world in 2003. Never mind that development and emergency relief rose from $10 billion during the last year of Bill Clinton's administration to $24 billion under George W. Bush in 2003. Or that, according to a German study, Americans contribute to charities nearly seven times as much a head as Germans do. Or that, adjusted for population, American philanthropy is more than two-thirds more than British giving.
There is a teenaged immaturity about the rest of the world's relationship with the US. Whenever a serious crisis erupts somewhere, our dependence on the US becomes obvious, and many hate the US because of it. That the hatred is irrational is beside the point."
I saw this at Free Exchange yesterday that compared private (non-governmental) aid among countries. The numbers are staggering.
"Too "Complex"?: Part II" by Thomas Sowell:
"So long as politicians can get some people's votes by publicly feeling their pain when it comes to housing costs, and other people's votes by restricting the building of housing, they can have a winning coalition at election time, which is their bottom line.
Economists may point out that the different members of this coalition have conflicting interests that could be better resolved through competition in the marketplace. But how many economists have ever put together a winning coalition?
So long as voters prefer heroes and villains to supply and demand, this game will continue to be played."
"McCain Raises Concerns About Subsidies for Solar Power" WSJ Washington Wire:
When asked of Sally Jewel, CEO of REI, what she would like McCain as president to do she replied:
The problem is there are no federal incentives to help defray the costs. “There isn’t anything significant on the federal side to help us make the right decisions,” she said. “We’re trying to do the right thing without really any incentives.”
To me, this sounds a little like a college freshman telling his parents he's trying to do the right thing by going to school, but he's lacking incentives to stay. He needs money. The feeling REI gets by saving the environment isn't enough incentive. After all, REI is a company with shareholders, so money (ie profits, for those who think that's a dirty word) is a pretty good incentive, but saving the environment costs so much money and they want taxpayers to subsidize the company's do-gooding.
"Who Will Pay For Promises Of Politicians?" IBD op-ed by Walter Williams:
"Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.
Politicians and a large percentage of the public lose sight of the unavoidable fact that for every created benefit, there's also a created cost, or, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman put it, "There's no free lunch."
While the person who receives the benefit might not pay or even be aware of the cost, as sure as night follows day, there is a cost borne by someone...
Americans are rightfully angry about higher energy and food prices, but their anger should be directed toward the true villains — the Congress and the White House."
"Gotta Love Sanford" Club for Growth:
SC Governor Mark Sanford sent out a press release that, among other things, lists his state's 10 craziest laws. Here are my favorites:
"1. State law requires an individual to complete 1,500 hours of instruction to become a cosmetologist. It takes more hours of licensing to become a cosmetologist in SC than it does to become a police officer (396 hours) or carry a concealed weapon (8 hours)."
"8. Circuses cannot exceed 48 hours at one place in any one year."
"10. Musical instruments are not allowed to be sold on Sunday."
"Specter wants independent probe into NFL’s ‘Spygate’" by Taylor Rushing for The Hill:
"Specter said the NFL “owes the public a lot more candor and a lot more credibility” in its handling of the controversy. The senator stopped short of alleging a cover-up but said he may press the Senate to hold hearings on the NFL’s antitrust exemption if the league does not launch a credible outside inquiry like the probe into steroids in baseball led last year by former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine)."
They really must be bored up there with nothing to do. Why is this the business of Congress? I don't fully understand how the antitrust exemption even applies to professional sports. They compete with different sports, such as MLB, the NBA, the NCAA, the PGA, the NHL, tennis, and numerous other entertainment activities. What would happen if they took away the exemption? I don't know, but I do know that the exemption has nothing to do with whatever ill Spector thinks happened.
"Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" WSJ editorial:
The article is an argument for income caps in the farm bill. I posted the following comment:
"I'll admit that I don't fully understand all of the idea of income caps on those who receive subsidies. It seems to me, though, that farmers who are capped out due to farm income are those with large farms and those who are capped out due to non-farm income are simply people who own the farm but actually do something else for a living. My comments are made with that understanding, so if that is wrong, well...so am I.
I see why conservatives, of whom I am one, prefer to see income caps in place -- it's an excuse to give fewer subsidies -- but I also think it's harmful to the subsidy debate in its entirety.
First of all, when we say we're only going to give subsidies to those with small incomes, it seems to me to be saying that we only care to subsidize inefficiency. Is the justification of not giving subsidies to larger, corporate farms because they have enough economies of scale or capital for investment to be more productive than smaller farms, making the subsidies unnecessary? If a farmer gets close to the cap and has the opportunity to invest in a piece of machinery that will increase output, and consequently income, will he face incentives not to so invest because he doesn't want to lose his subsidies? Is this any different than the argument against a highly progressive income tax?
Second, I think it plays into the class warfare battlefield, a place that I never like, not because of the arguments but because of its divisiveness. Pitting "big" vs. "small" or "the millionaires" vs. "the rest of us" is never a helpful talking point.
Ultimately, I think talking about income caps is simply an attempt to turn typical liberal arguments of fairness against themselves. Maybe income caps are the only way to avoid paying even higher subsidies, but to me it seems a little intellectually dishonest coming from conservatives. I would rather us stick to our guns of no subsidies and avoid using emotional and populist appeals. But I'm no politician."
This Week's Song by The Raconteurs - Top Yourself
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