Economics & Finance

New-Age Earmarks

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Yesterday, Joe Biden was holding forth on how the Obama administration will ensure that earmarks are kept out of the various economic-stimulus bills that the administration will be introducing.

It’s actually possible that he means what he says, as far as the traditional kind of earmark goes–that is, a provision for specific spending, in a specific geographical area, at the behest of a particular Congressman.

But in a broader sense, much of the economic policy of the incoming Obama administration seems to be centered around earmarks, albeit earmarks of a different kind. Instead of Congressional-district-based earmarks, we will have SIC-code-based earmarks (SIC code=standard industrial classification), providing benefits to particular industries, and reverse-bill-of-attainder earmarks, directed in favor of particular named companies or small groups of companies.

Traditional earmarks tended to politicize certain kinds of businesses, such as local construction companies. The new-age earmarks will tend to politicize all types of business, throughout the entire national economy. Your business success if you are an executive or business owner–your employment if you are a worker–your returns on investment if you are a shareholder or bondholder–will increasingly depend on the political rather than the business astuteness of company management.

A Truly Diabolical Monetary Policy

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In Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles desires the introduction of paper money. At his instigation, courtiers approach the emperor at a masked ball and get him to sign the following document:

To all it may Concern upon Our Earth
This paper is a thousand guilders worth
There lies, sure warrant of it and full measure
Beneath Our earth a wealth of buried treasure
As for this wealth, the means are now in train
To raise it and redeem the scrip again

In the bright sunlight of morning, the now-sober emperor observes hundreds of pieces of paper, each bearing his signature and claiming to be equivalent in value to gold, and demands to know what is being done to apprehend the counterfeiters.

Treasurer: Recall–Your own self signed it at the time,
Only last night. You stood in Great Pan’s mask
And with the Chancellor we approach to ask:
“Allow yourself high festive joy and nourish
The common weal with but a pen’s brief flourish.”
You signed: that night by men of a thousand arts
The thing was multiplied a thousand parts
So that like blessing should all accrue
We stamped up all the lower series too
Tens, Thirties, Fifties, Hundreds did we edit
The good it did folk, you would hardly credit.
Your city, else half molded in stagnation
Now teems revived in prosperous elation!
Although your name has long been widely blessed
It’s not been spelt with such fond interest
The alphabet has now been proved redundanct
In this sign everyone finds grace abundant

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Employers as Liege Lords

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I missed the entire  Republic Windows & Doors strike. [h/t Instapundit]. The laid-off workers apper to think they have a right to shake down the bankrupt company’s creditors in order to get their  severance  pay. It seems that Bank of America, by  virtue  of  receiving  the company’s physical assets as a result of its default, is now responsible for its workers.  

Many people do not seem to have the idea that employers and employees are social equals in an economic partnership, but instead view employers as social superiors morally obligated to look after the welfare of their inferior employees. By virtue of giving someone a job, you  acquire  a  feudal  responsibility to look out for them for the rest of their lives.  

[Note: There may be more to the story than the media, trapped as it is in their “heroic  strikers” narrative, are willing to tell us. Anybody with more info please chime in.]

More on the Auto Bailout

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Newly-elected Congressman Jared Polis (a Democrat!) offers some interesting thoughts on the politics of the automotive industry:

Our United States Congress of lawyers, doctors, diplomats, retired military officers and career politicians — along with their staffs of intelligent young political science majors and MBAs — now finds itself poring over “business plans” submitted this week by Ford, GM and Chrysler. People who have never before in their lives seen — no less implemented — a business plan are now trying to decide if these companies will succeed by means of a “capital infusion” with various imposed preconditions and negotiate what we taxpayers (investors) should be getting for our money. Something is wrong with this picture.

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Thompson on the Economy

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Belmont Club links to Fred Thompson  on the economy.   That rumbling voice inspires a kind of good humor;  it always seems the voice of good humor – the masculine equivalent of Dolly Parton’s laugh.    Here it is in the service of  satire and  beneath its humor is a picture of the equivalent to the Tory approach to the Brits in 1776; Thompson,  a father for two generations, concludes with  the equivalent of Paine’s remarks.

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