The New New Deal

If you do not get Imprimis magazine, you must start now! Subscriptions are free, it's a very brief read (5-10 minutes), and it's always excellent.

Warning: If you are of a liberal political persuasion, exposure to the truth presented in Imprimis could be a shock.

In the January Issue, there is an article by Burton W. Folsom, Jr. He holds the Charles F. Kline Chair in History and Management at Hillsdale College. In the article, he discusses the effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal". The amount of political wrangling, graft, and corruption involved in the handouts of Federal money is staggering. In addition, many of the programs created had unintended (and in some cases disastrous) consequences.

His concluding sentence:

If history is a guide, we have every reason to believe that if President Obama institutes a New New Deal, then universal health care, federal bailouts, and jobs stimulus programs will be costly, will be politicized, and will fail.

The more things change ...

An interesting story today on the BBC about "banksters", a word which combines "banker" and "gangster".

In 1928, Professor William Z. Ripley of Harvard condemned the practices of Wall Street at that time. He called them "prestidigitation, double-shuffling, honey-fugling, hornswoggling and skullduggery".

He tried to warn then-President Coolidge, but the President was an insider on Wall Street, making money using some of the very practices Ripley was citing. The result was the crash of 1929 and a decade of depression. A depression, by the way, made much worse and much longer by the Socialistic programs of Franklin Roosevelt.

Alas, the situation is remarkably similar today. And we now have a President who will take a slim victory in the polls as a "mandate" to do things far above and beyond what Roosevelt ever dreamed of. I hope you have comfortable shoes. You'll need them when you're standing next to me in the soup line.

Read the BBC story here. There's an interesting twist at the end.

Thoughts on the election

Now that B. Hussein Obama has completed his purchase of the Presidency, a few thoughts.

I was on the campus of William Jewell College yesterday. Melissa says that there must be a budget line-item in the Obama campaign's books for sidewalk chalk. Sure enough, every few feet on all the sidewalks I was on, there was another "Vote Obama" message. One said, "Want more green cars on the road?" Another, "Worried about finding a job?" And another said, "Want affordable healthcare? Vote Obama."

The problem is, that few people (and least of all college students) stop to consider the cost of those options. Putting more green cars on the road, giving people jobs, paying for healthcare ... they all seem like good ideas, but they all have a cost. By conveniently ignoring the cost, the tax-and-spenders can buy votes with promises of things, and the voters just eat it up and march in lockstep to the polls.

In some ways, the cut-taxes-and-spend crowd is worse, because they want to buy your vote from both ends: What you'll get, and it will even cost less. Every politician tells us they want to cut out the porkbarrel spending, but it's those very porky projects that buy re-election votes. If a Congressperson truly turned down everything of a porcine nature for the home state, he or she would be out of a job come the next election, no question about it.

But giving people who won't work a bunch of freebies paid for by those who will is precisely the wrong way to build or sustain a great nation. It encourages mediocrity, or worse. When asked, "What is wrong with the redistribution of wealth, which Obama talked about as far back as a 2001 interview?", Senator McCain said it very well:

That is a bold, left-wing view of how you help people that's been tried in other countries. In America, you don't take money from one group and give it to another. You create jobs, create opportunities, and give people the ability to accumulate wealth. We have Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance. But to somehow say that when "Joe the Plumber" reaches a certain income level, we're going to take money from him and give it to somebody else, that's a fundamental contradiction of what made this country the strongest and greatest nation in the world.
Business Week November 10, 2008, p.20