This not according to me but moderate-liberal editorialist for the WaPo David Broder.

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Seth

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The referenced article is the most powerful and passionate piece I have read on the website to date. It is a long article but it is worth the read. I may write a response post that highlights my favorites points. But here is a taste…

Soon, however, those who come to power, even with good intentions, discover that for all men to be made equal, some men must be made poor, and most men will not agree to be made poor in the absence of force. So force must be applied, assets must be seized, censorship must be imposed, dissidents must be jailed, enemies must be destroyed. Men must be made equal by any means necessary, and soon enough those means include intimidation, imprisonment, and execution.

Again and again, the handsome smile of the reformer is twisted into the callous sneer of the tyrant. Those who present themselves as saviors are always the most dangerous, for unlike the one true savior, who rendered unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, they must work their will on the things of this world, and one cannot remake the world without the application of force.

At the heart of the ideal of fairness, in the peculiar ideological sense in which the term has come to be used, is the fundamental mistake that all workers — not just all workers, but all human beings, including those who simply choose not to work — should be equally rewarded, regardless of effort and ability. It is a problem that was noted as early as the mid-18th century, even before the French Revolution transformed that unfortunate nation into a bloody shrine to godless egalitarianism. As Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot wrote: “To permit a large number of men to live free of charge is to encourage laziness and all the disorders that follow; it is to render the condition of the idler preferable to that of the man who works….” (qtd. by G. Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity 179).

Under socialism, those who are lazy and unproductive, or not productive at all, or even blatantly destructive, get a free ride; those who are skillful and enterprising are punished. When ambitious workers attempt to get ahead on the basis of their abilities, as inevitably they do, they are harassed, beaten, imprisoned, and executed. The longer that ambition is repressed, the less productive the overall economy becomes. At that point, the wrath of the state is unleashed on all workers, not just on the more able.

Seth

Here is a related article on what Geithner is facing and why it is a political/financially difficult thing to overcome.

Seth

LINK.

The article is laced with some sarcasm but makes good points.

I am particularly agreeing with the idea that what we will have is perpetual campaigning.  So here is the pattern.  For every problem Obama will blame Bush.  For every piece of good news, Obama will take credit.  And to fix this in the public’s mind and to influence the outcomes he wants, Obama will be in perpetual campaign mode.

This is the opposite from Bush.  Agree or disagree, he operated on principle.  And he hardly ever defended himself.

I hope that Lincoln’s Law is true.  You can fool some of the people some of the time…but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Seth

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Seth

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This is an incredible and pathetic story.  I wonder how he’ll treat our enemies when they visit.  Or maybe his intention is to nurture some new closest ally that will get Camp David sleepovers.  Syria comes to mind.

I am embarrassed by this. I do not know if Obama could have been more classless.

Seth

During the Fall 2009 TARP debate we here at FatTriplets got into some pretty intense debate about the cause of the banking debacle.  And if we concluded anything, I would say it was that there was plenty of blame to spread around — to both Democrats and Republicans.

And then a few days ago I compared American Thinker (Conservative) to Daily Kos (Liberal).

I take that back.

Show me the Daily Kos equivalent to THIS American Thinker article which posits the same point…there is plenty of blame to share.  Daily Kos is worse than partisan.  They are utopian ideologues who JUST DON’T GET IT.  In Government We Trust is there mantra.  !@%$& idiots.  Now arguing that the Tea Parties (40 in toto)held across the country this past Friday was a grand conspiracy orchestrated by CNBC, Rick Santelli, and the Republican party.

The upside of all of this is that while they continue to think that the 2008 election represent a sea-change in American attitudes and beliefs rather than an endorsement of an excellent communicator who ran as a Clintonesque moderate.  They can keep their head in the sand if they like.  And Obama will get in 2010 the exact same thing that Clinton got in 1994, a Republican controlled congress.

As Steve opined earlier…it just might save the Obama presidency.

Seth

Robert Samuelson, moderate economics op-ed editorialist for the Washington Post opines in today’s paper that the stimulus is mostly just a collosal waste of money and a huge, unexamined advancement of the long-time liberal wishlists not to mention political payback to all of Obama’s political supporters.  (Although that is my way of interpreting the result).

HT to AmericanThinker.com

Seth

I moseyed on over to Abu Hatem’s political view page and was pretty amazed by the similarities of our political views.  Abu is a devout orthodox muslim who has been doing some blogging over at Culture 11.

Seth

Great Post over at Culture 11 that is saying what I have been thinking.  Neo-conservatism embraced by George W Bush were at the heart of the problems of his administration.  There is nothing “conservative” about them.  I hope that these past years and the spanking that the republicans got serve as a permanent repudiation.

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Seth

Greg Mankiw gives very sensible advice to the President-Elect:

• Listen to your economists
• Embrace some Republican Ideas
• Pay attention to the government’s budget constraints
• Recognize your past mistakes

Read the whole thing for the particulars.

Steve

In keeping with the spirit of this post, I thought these two paragraphs in this WSJ editorial were informative:

While many voters may think they’ve voted for “change” in Mr. Obama, they also handed power to the oldest forces in the Old Democratic Party. Jimmy Carter campaigned as a moderate and outsider, but Congressional liberals quickly ran his budget director, the economic centrist Bert Lance, out of town. Then they overrode Mr. Carter’s veto of a pork-barrel water bill. Mr. Carter referred to the tax committees as “ravenous wolves” after they transformed his tax reform into a special-interest bouquet. Next came Reagan.

Bill Clinton also campaigned as a moderate, but in his first two years he was unable to govern as Congress pursued liberal priorities, including a big boost in taxes and spending. Recall Roberta Achtenberg as the scourge of the Boy Scouts and Joycelyn Elders calling for the legalization of drugs? Mr. Clinton chose — or was forced — to take up gun control and HillaryCare before welfare reform. Next came Newt Gingrich.

Obama is a great politician if nothing else.  Maybe, just maybe, his great political survival instinct will kick in and he will come out of the moderate, centrist closet.

Steve

Ross Douthat channels Seth and I here, here and here on the issue of Obama and abortion.  Ross asserts:

Look, there are a variety of not-unreasonable ways for Americans who believe the unborn deserve legal protection to justify a vote for Barack Obama. But to claim that a candidate who seems primed to begin disbursing taxpayer dollars in support of abortion and embryo-destructive research as soon as he enters the White House somehow represented the better choice for anti-abortion Americans on anti-abortion grounds is an argument that deserves to met, not with engagement, but with contempt.

This is the exact same argument I made in this post.

Steve

This letter by Steven Horwitz, Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University, beautifully rebuts the notion that the current economic meltdown was a failure of free-markets.  He indicts five government interventions in the market as being largely culpable:

• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac insured loans that would never have happened in a truly free-market while forcing banks to underwrite loans to “distressed areas” that never would have gotten approved using traditional underwriting standards.
• With the  1994 renewal and revision of the Community Reinvestment Act, “Congress explicitly directed Fannie and Freddie to expand their lending to borrowers with marginal credit as a way of expanding homeownership.”
• The worst hit areas in the country are characterized by significant land use regulations which drove up the prices of homes and contributed to risky borrowing.
• The Federal Reserve, “nominally private but granted enormous monopoly” powers to regulate the currency, drove down interest rates and fueled the borrowing binge.
• Finally, in 2004 and 2005, as penance for an accounting scandal, Fannie and Freddie agreed to expand their lending to low income customers.  “Both agreed to acquire greater amounts of subprime and Alt-A loans, sending the green light to banks to originate them. From 2003 [corrected on 10/19/08] to 2006, the percentage of loans in those riskier categories grew from 8% to 20% of all US mortgage originations“

Horwitz letter does not deny or mitigate the place that “greed” played in this crisis.  Indeed, profit seeking and maximization are like the air we breathe or gravity, ever-present and unavoidable.  He opines:

No free market economist thinks “greed is always good.” What we think is good are institutions that play to the self-interest of private actors by rewarding them for serving the public, not just themselves. We believe that’s what genuinely free markets do. Market exchanges are mutually beneficial. When the law messes up by either poorly defining the rules of the game or trying to override them through regulation, self-interested behavior is no longer economically mutually beneficial. The private sector then profits by serving narrow political ends rather than serving the public. In such cases, greed leads to bad consequences. But it’s bad not because it’s greed/self-interest rather because the institutional context within which it operates channels self-interest in socially unproductive ways.

Near the end of the letter Horwitz states:

We can disagree in good faith about what to do next, and we can disagree in good faith about the degree to which government intervention caused the problems, but blaming a non-existent free market for a crisis that clearly was to some extent the result of government’s extensive interventions in that market is unfair. So if I have persuaded you of nothing else, I hope deeply that I have persuaded you of that.

In the end, all I can ask of you is that you continue to think this through. Explaining this crisis by greed won’t get you far as greed, like gravity, is a constant in our world. Explaining it as a failure of free markets faces the obvious truth that these markets were far from free of government. Consider that you may be mistaken. Consider that perhaps government intervention, not free markets, caused profit-seekers to undertake activities that harmed the economy. Consider that government intervention might have led banks and other organizations to take on risks that they never should have. Consider that government central banks are the only organizations capable of fueling this fire with excess credit. And consider that various regulations might have forced banks into bad loans and artificially pushed up home prices. Lastly, consider that private sector actors are quite happy to support such intervention and regulation because it is profitable.

Horwitz also superbly explains why industry often supports regulatory regimes (it reduces competition) and often tend to “capture” the regulatory mechanisms that are supposed to be overseeing their activities. Read the whole thing.

Steve

HT to Don at Cafe Hayek

…voter surveys find no broad ideological realignment behind that (partisan) shift

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Seth