The Obama Administration and Congress: Children at Play

As parents watch children play, they sometimes notice that the games have gone from light roughhouse to serious violence. Someone has to step in and exert some control before the weaker children are injured. That's what adults do when dealing
with children who lack the internal controls needed to get along in society.

One gets the same feeling in watching the current frenetic activity of government: trying to reform the health care system, solve the problem of energy usage, prop up the banking system, the car manufacturers, and the economy as a whole, deal with tobacco usage and obesity — — an endless list of things the Senators and Congressmen object to.

There must be adults somewhere in the political system who can say, "Time out!" You can't do these things. You simply cannot produce enough electricity with solar and wind to achieve the goals of the administration and the Congress. You can't make everything come out the way you want it to. If people don't want to borrow, you can't make banks lend to them. If people don't want to buy cars, or houses, you can't make them buy.

One would like to think that both parties in Congress would say,
"Let's stop playing games. Let's stop deluding ourselves. We can't
afford the luxury of spending trillions of taxed or borrowed dollars just to make us feel good about ourselves."

Perhaps the worst thing that ever happened in this country is that the government decided to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade of the 60s and actually succeeded. Since then, any expensive, risky project that has been proposed has been supported by saying, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can do X." It isn't true. We cannot eliminate a trillion dollar deficit by cutting 170 million dollars in spending, cuts that everyone knows will not be made anyway. We can't make costly changes in the world at no cost.

Where are the grown-ups in this country? Are they going to let the children destroy it? When will they step in and say, "Time out!"

More Obama-style Central Control

As a further example of Obama-style central control, a new draft transportation bill introduced in the House of Representatives on June 18 establishes an "Office of Livability" in the Department of Transportation to ensure that we live at the correct urban densities, so that "States and metropolitan areas achieve progress towards national transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals."

These arbitrary "greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals" seem likely to give the DOT absolute control not only over all transportation investments made by states and metropolitan regions, but also over land-use planning and development.

Why is the federal government involved in urban transport planning? Major federal involvement in roads started in 1956 to establish the federal Highway Trust Fund to finance the Interstate Highway System (IHS). That financing system was scheduled for sunset after completion of the IHS. However (surprise, surprise!), although the IHS was completed in the 1990s, the federal financing mechanism remains, and is used to force the states to accept such absurdities as 55 mph speed limits and federal land use regulation in metropolitan areas.

The full story can be found on URL http://tinyurl.com/ldocdn

Bush's Hubris vs. Obama's Central Control

Democrats accused the Bush administration of hubris in attempting to “impose democracy” on middle-eastern nations locked into dictatorship. Perhaps they were right; maybe it was hubris to imagine that people of other nations would want to follow our example; perhaps they were not ready for a free society.

But what is one to make of what the Democrats are trying to do to our economy? Their top economists are trying to manage markets which involve the independent decisions and actions of millions of individuals. Years of examples have demonstrated that such management is a fool’s errand. Did we learn nothing from the disaster that was Communism? Didn’t we have enough of our own experience of inflation despite price and wage controls in the 1970s to make the point that government cannot “manage” the economy? Wasn’t the result of the government’s misguided encouragement of subprime lending in the last decade a good enough example of how complicated are the interactions of an economy and how even the best intentions can lead to disaster?

In the eleventh century, Canute, king of the Danes, demonstrated the limits of his power by commanding the tide to not come in. Naturally, the tide came in anyway. Today, our government commands banks to lend even when borrowers are unworthy or uninterested in borrowing; it commands car manufacturers to make and sell cars that people don’t want to buy; it spends wildly to “stimulate” economic activity. Loans do not magically appear, cars do not fly out of dealerships, and the economy goes along at its own pace, oblivious to the government’s demand to roll back the tide of recession.

Today’s economists and politicians should take a lesson from Canute. There are some things they want to make happen that are beyond their power to achieve.