Obama

Global Regulatory Capture

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Richard Fernandez:

Therefore the mindless expansion of regulatory power is not always a good thing. Increasing the power of government without a corresponding increase in transparency, does not, as many liberals believe, lead to the control of “rent-seeking capitalists” by the state, but on the contrary, leads to the control of the state and the industry by individuals whose key competitive advantage is the skill at corrupting public officials. We wind up working for the players. When business is globalized, then regulatory capture may be effected by foreign businessmen. Those businessmen are often indistinguishable from foreign leaders, especially in the case of the oil-rich Middle East. And the foreign leaders/businessmen end up capturing the regulatory mechanism. Then we wind up working, as some dons and British politicians wound up working, for the Brother Leader who is, as everybody now realizes, a complete homicidal maniac.
 
But it seemed like a good idea at the time. A combination of unaccountable, but powerful regulatory agencies in a globalized economy sets the stage for the capture of agencies by foreign despots. One of the dangers of the President’s “healthcare reform” and “Green energy” policies is that it creates precisely those conditions for the huge medical and oil industries. By centralizing control of the the healthcare industry, which is nearly 1/6 of the US economy, Obama has set up a target for regulatory capture more tempting than anything that had ever come before.

Almost no one disputes that doctrinaire socialism, where despots run farms, steel mills and national airlines, is a colossal failure. But modern crony-capitalism or fascism, which tacitly outsources the means of production to well managed, nominally private enterprises while accreting ultimate control in the hands of politicians and their minions, remains viable as long as taxpayers continue (voluntarily or otherwise) to fund it. Many people think this system is unsustainable, but because it’s impossible to know accurately when the system will fail and a lot of people benefit from it (see this post, for example), it seems likely that the system will appear strong until almost the moment at which it goes down. And in the meantime it provides opportunity for the Kaddafys of the world to use stolen funds to buy entire governments.

If you are bothered by flies on a manure pile you remove the manure, you don’t try to train the flies. If government corruption is a problem the best way to improve the situation in the long run is by radically cutting the size and scope of government, i.e., radically cutting government spending as a fraction of GDP.

The GOP is prepping the battlefield badly II.

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It’s Easier to Blame Congress:

Whereas the 1995 shutdowns involved presidential vetoes, a 2011 version could result from Congressional failure to send the president a continuing resolution in the first place. The blame will thus fall on Capitol Hill instead of the White House. True, Democrats control the Senate and would arguably share responsibility for a deadlock. But as was the case 16 years ago, a gifted communicator sits in the White House and sets the tone for his fellow Democrats. Together, they will point the finger at the G.O.P. If the Republicans are as splintered as they were in 1995, they will again lose the war of perceptions.

RTWT.

Part I here.

Michael Barone weighs on the Wisconsin showdown.

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Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

RTWT

Quote of the Day

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Richard Fernandez:

Why would anyone believe, even for a moment, that any Western state could “pre-emptively” nuke the Muslim world when it cannot muster the will to secure its borders, balance its budget, get Pakistan to release a diplomat or get Argentina to release a C-17”²s cargo load of equipment? That would be like thinking that man who can’t run 50 yards can run the 100 meter dash in 9.5 seconds.
 
The path to nukes is far more probably going to take the path of use in desperation. And in fact a country which secured its borders, drilled for its own oil, got Pakistan to release diplomats, and did the normal things would be the only kind of country which might use nukes pre-emptively because it conceive of such a strategy. Yet ironically it would be the kind of country that wouldn’t have to attack pre-emptively. The idea of country going straight from supine behavior to nuking pre-emptively is a fantasy built on the awareness of weakness. Solve the weakness and then your enemies will consider you capable of pre-emption. But guess what: solve the weakness and you won’t have to pre-empt. They will back away.
 
This is all elementary game theory; and tried, true and hoary deterrence theory. Be strong and you won’t need to use nukes. Be weak and you’ll use them for sure.
 
The problem of radical Islam is the problem of Western weakness. That is the problem to which the policy nuking Muslims is an impertinent answer. Who’s going to do it? Obama? And yet if Obama lost the next election in favor of someone who might actually resist, then the probability of having to pre-empt declines dramatically.
 
The logical problem is that any strategy which requires pre-emptively nuking the Islamic world implies a President who is too weak to do it anyway. But that doesn’t mean it might not happen. As I’ve argued ad nauseam, the biggest danger to nuclear use, in both the Israeli and general Western case, is via the act in desperation.
 
As long as Israel’s strategic position is strong, it will not unleash the nukes. But only in its dying gasp will that be certain. So what do the geniuses at State do? Bring Israel to the point of strategic death.
 
For the same reasons, the weaker Obama makes America the more its enemies are emboldened. Yet this does not bring pre-emption closer. That becomes more and more unthinkable until the last push, when desperation takes hold. Then the probabilities go from near zero to near 1.
 
The Pakistanis and even the rapists in Tahrir Square are testing, testing. And they are finding no resistance. Therefore they will push and sooner or later, they will push too far. Why not since no stop signal will be received from the Smartest Man in the World.
 
Then when things go too far, desperation, not calculation, will unleash the Apocalypse. It’s happened before. In 1939. It’s not impossible, just conveniently forgotten. The Western elite are like the Bourbons, who remember everything and have learned nothing.

Circular Reasoning

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Glenn Reynolds quotes Stanley Kurtz:

Tea Party moxie and the shellacking notwithstanding, the GOP establishment remains reluctant to highlight Obama’s radicalism. I understand the reasons for this, and they are by no means trivial. While Obama’s policies are opposed by many, he remains personally popular. It seems disrespectful to attribute an ideology to the president that he himself won’t own up to. Words like “radical,” much less “socialist,” sound impolite. Yet, without defining the president in a way that happens to be not only politically advantageous, but true, I doubt Obama can be stopped. Telling the truth about this president is how we shellacked him to begin with. . . . Perhaps I’m wrong and “the president’s abdication of leadership” sound bite will be enough to defeat “the GOP’s heartless cuts.” Even so, as an alternative, I suggest: “Obama’s radical plans are leading us off a cliff.”

I don’t disagree with Kurtz. I’m annoyed by the “but Obama is personally popular” meme because I think it results in part from the failure of mainstream Republicans to call Obama on his arrogance, his dishonesty and his gratuitously nasty behavior toward political opponents and members of groups against which he holds grudges (e.g., British and Israeli officials). He really isn’t a nice guy, but his personal decency gets asserted so often that it seems to have become a kind of big lie that people accept (and, ironically, that some people accept because they reasonably fear Obama’s supporters will accuse them of racism if they say harsh things about him).