No, not my jury duty summons -- that's not until tomorrow morning.
I refer instead to a phone call I just received, in which it was my privilege, I guess, to listen to a recording which began, "Hello, Craig. This is Senator John Cornyn. With the economy--"
I confess to not knowing how the message ended.
But do rest easy, Senator Cornyn, you who voted for the recent national socialization of the US financial sector. I'll definitely be voting next Tuesday. You bet.
My son pointed me to this video interview of John Cleese discussing Sarah Palin:
Mind you, I'm an admirer of John Cleese, but The Argument from European Voter Opinion is, after Hitler, 423 Italian "governments" since 1964, Chirac, and the vogue of Eurocommunism, er, perhaps a bit weak. Nice parrot comment, though.
But over here we have Leonard Peikoff on the four knaves mountebanks subhumans candidates:
Personally, I think McCain comes across as a tired moron, Obama as a lying phony, Biden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag, and Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron, a phony and a windbag.
Good stuff.
(Hat tip: Joseph Kellard for the Leonard Peikoff comments)
John Lewis quickly disposes of the piffle that John McCain "loves his country," and then goes on this:
Let us consider the Republicans more broadly, over the past two generations. What have the leading Republicans actually learned since Goldwater? On a policy level the answer is to quit worrying and love the welfare state. They claim not to oppose it, but to better manage it. The essence of their plan is: “my gang will do a better job.”
But this is not simply a political question or problem, and the only effective solution cannot come from politics, as Craig Biddle points out:
American politicians trumpet the alleged virtue of sacrifice not only because they personally believe sacrifice to be a virtue, but also because doing so gets them elected—and because, once elected, it enables them to accomplish their corresponding goals in office.Over the past few decades, Americans have consistently selected candidates and elected and re-elected presidents who call for self-sacrifice. Why?
I agree that it's an ethics problem, and calls for a solution which involves re-evaluation of ethics. I'd say that the shopworn "lesser of two evils" argument is completely non-operational if one is speaking of the Republicans. A party of sellouts, Rooseveltian-Wilsonian crusaders and avowed mystics is not less evil than the other party.
And, last but not least, I invite readers to consider this question: Did Alan Greenspan betray capitalism and Objectivism when he agreed to serve as chairman of the Fed? A lot of people think he did, but I'd argue that those people are ignoring history. For one thing, his tenure at the Fed goes back to the second Reagan administration. But there's more.
Greenspan was the Chairman of President Ford's Council of Econmic Advisors and thus supported the beyond idiotic Whip Inlfation Now campaign. Rememebr WIN buttons? Now there's intellectual activism for you, and sound economics as well, I'm sure. Don't forget, either, his participation in Reagan's "bipartisan" committee to "save" Social Security. "Bipartisan," I think we all know, is but another term for "tax increases," and that's exactly what that commission recommended.
"No sympathy should be wasted on Greenspan," writes Edward Cline:
He did what John Galt in Atlas Shrugged refused to do even at the point of a gun and under physical torture: he agreed to become an economic dictator of the country. Nor was he threatened with torture or death as Galileo was when he was forced by the Church to recant his theory of the solar system. Of all the economists who have advised various administrations over the last century, Greenspan had the least excuse for advocating statist economics.
George Reisman addresses the charge that the free market is the cause of the current economic debacle(s):
This vast loss of capital in the housing debacle is what is responsible for the inability of banks to make loans to many businesses to which they normally could and would lend. The reason they cannot now do so is that the funds and the real wealth that have been lost no longer exist and thus cannot be lent to anyone. The Federal Reserve’s policy of credit expansion based on the creation of new and additional checkbook money has thus served to give capital to unworthy borrowers who never should have had it in the first place and to deprive other, far more credit worthy borrowers of the capital they need to stay in businesses. Its policy has been one of redistribution and destruction.
"Redistribution and destruction." I think we're in for a lot more of both over the next few years.
8:02 PM Mountain Time:
Did Joe Biden actually just say "Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacs?"
An understandable gaffe -- I've been on a bit of television, and there is definitely pressure felt. I'm just curious as to whether this will get anywhere near the attention of George Bush's use of "Grecians" a few years back.
UPDATE: I'm reliably informed that "Bosniak" is a term for Bosnian Muslims. Okay, fine, if a bit obscure -- more than a bit. I still think the comparison to the "Grecians" treatment stands.
Not that President Bush -- a Harvard MBA, mind you -- knows this. Nor, apparently, does Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, or Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke. And they are not alone.
Truth, however, is difficult to refute.
Henry Hazlitt begins chapter VI of his Economics In One Lesson with a simple assertion:
Government "encouragement" to business is sometimes as much to be feared as government hostility. This supposed encouragement often takes the form of a direct grant of government credit or a guarantee of government loans.
It is well worth reading Hazlitt's 1946 classic, available online here, and here.
I highly recommend buying a copy, because you'll want to highlight passages and make notes in the margins.
A lot.
But Henry Hazlitt deserves to have the last word. "The government," he writes, "never lends or gives anything to business that it does not take away from business." Ah, so true, and:
In any case, the net result of government credit has not been to increase the amount of wealth produced by the community but to reduce it, because the available real capital (consisting of actual farms, tractors, etc.) has been placed in the hands of the less efficient borrowers rather than in the hands of the more efficient and trustworthy.
Too bad we can't put fish hooks, gold coins, and canned beans and tuna in our 401(k) accounts. We're gonna need 'em.