Now, whether or not you support President Bush, whether or not you support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether or not you share the sentiments that we are fighting "evil" in the world by engaging in these conflicts - there is a new documentary that you should see.
It's produced by PBS and it's called Torturing Democracy. It is a fascinating and in depth look at the legal and rhetorical underpinnings of our government's strategies and tactics for interrogation and detention of "terrorists." It is, in my opinion, appalling and very difficult to watch, but most of all, it is important.
So, if you have a spare hour or so, please, watch it. At very least, this is a production partially sponsored by your tax dollars (as it is part of PBS), so you can watch where your money goes.
19 November, 2008
17 November, 2008
To Bailout or Not Bailout...
The Bailout's Fault Lines
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 14, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Finally, the outlines of a coherent debate on the federal bailout. This comes as welcome relief from a campaign season that gave us the House Republicans' know-nothing rejectionism, John McCain's mindless railing against "greed and corruption" and Barack Obama's detached enunciation of vacuous bailout "principles" that allowed him to be all things to all people.
Now clarity is emerging. The fault line is the auto industry bailout. The Democrats are pushing hard for it. The White House is resisting.
Underlying the policy differences is a philosophical divide. The Bush administration sees the $700 billion rescue as an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to stretch the meaning of "bank" by extending protection to such entities as American Express. But fundamentally, he sees government as saving institutions that deal in money, not other stuff.
Democrats have a larger canvas, with government intervening in other sectors of the economy to prevent the cascade effect of mass unemployment leading to more mortgage defaults and business failures (as consumer spending plummets), in turn dragging down more businesses and financial institutions, producing more unemployment, etc. -- the death spiral of the 1930s.
Bush is trying to move the LIBOR or the TED spread, which measure credit flows. The Democrats' index is the unemployment rate.
With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious.
First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you've gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?
The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?
Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations, and unworkable work rules such as "job banks," a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work.
The point of the Democratic bailout is to protect the unions by preventing this kind of restructuring. Which will guarantee the continued failure of these companies, but now they will burn tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It's the ultimate in lemon socialism.
Democrats are suggesting, however, an even more ambitious reason to nationalize. Once the government owns Detroit, it can remake it. The euphemism here is "retool" Detroit to make cars for the coming green economy.
Liberals have always wanted the auto companies to produce the kind of cars they insist everyone should drive: small, light, green and cute. Now they will have the power to do it.
In World War II, government had the auto companies turning out tanks. Now they would be made to turn out hybrids. The difference is that, in the middle of a world war, tanks have a buyer. Will hybrids? One of the reasons Detroit is in such difficulty is that consumers have been resisting the smaller, less powerful, less safe cars forced on the industry by fuel-efficiency mandates. Now Detroit would be forced to make even more of them.
If you think we have economic troubles today, consider the effects of nationalizing an industry of this size, but now run by bureaucrats issuing production quotas to fit five-year plans to meet politically mandated fuel-efficiency standards -- to lift us to the sunny uplands of the coming green utopia.
Republican minimalism -- saving the credit-issuing utilities -- certainly risks not doing enough. But the Democratic drift toward massive industrial policy threatens to grow into the guaranteed inefficiencies of command-economy maximalism.
In this crisis, we agree to suspend the invisible hand of Adam Smith -- but not in order to be crushed by the heavy hand of government.
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, November 14, 2008
WASHINGTON -- Finally, the outlines of a coherent debate on the federal bailout. This comes as welcome relief from a campaign season that gave us the House Republicans' know-nothing rejectionism, John McCain's mindless railing against "greed and corruption" and Barack Obama's detached enunciation of vacuous bailout "principles" that allowed him to be all things to all people.
Now clarity is emerging. The fault line is the auto industry bailout. The Democrats are pushing hard for it. The White House is resisting.
Underlying the policy differences is a philosophical divide. The Bush administration sees the $700 billion rescue as an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to stretch the meaning of "bank" by extending protection to such entities as American Express. But fundamentally, he sees government as saving institutions that deal in money, not other stuff.
Democrats have a larger canvas, with government intervening in other sectors of the economy to prevent the cascade effect of mass unemployment leading to more mortgage defaults and business failures (as consumer spending plummets), in turn dragging down more businesses and financial institutions, producing more unemployment, etc. -- the death spiral of the 1930s.
Bush is trying to move the LIBOR or the TED spread, which measure credit flows. The Democrats' index is the unemployment rate.
With almost 5 million workers supported by the auto industry, Democrats are pressing for a federal rescue. But the problems are obvious.
First, the arbitrariness. Where do you stop? Once you've gone beyond the financial sector, every struggling industry will make a claim on the federal treasury. What are the grounds for saying yes or no?
The criteria will inevitably be arbitrary and political. The money will flow preferentially to industries with lines to Capitol Hill and the White House. To the companies heavily concentrated in the districts of committee chairmen. To clout. Is this not precisely the kind of lobby-driven policymaking that Obama ran against?
Second is the sheer inefficiency. Saving Detroit means saving it from bankruptcy. As we have seen with the airlines, bankruptcy can allow operations to continue while helping shed fatally unsupportable obligations. For Detroit, this means release from ruinous wage deals with their astronomical benefits (the hourly cost of a Big Three worker: $73; of an American worker for Toyota: $48), massive pension obligations, and unworkable work rules such as "job banks," a euphemism for paying vast numbers of employees not to work.
The point of the Democratic bailout is to protect the unions by preventing this kind of restructuring. Which will guarantee the continued failure of these companies, but now they will burn tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. It's the ultimate in lemon socialism.
Democrats are suggesting, however, an even more ambitious reason to nationalize. Once the government owns Detroit, it can remake it. The euphemism here is "retool" Detroit to make cars for the coming green economy.
Liberals have always wanted the auto companies to produce the kind of cars they insist everyone should drive: small, light, green and cute. Now they will have the power to do it.
In World War II, government had the auto companies turning out tanks. Now they would be made to turn out hybrids. The difference is that, in the middle of a world war, tanks have a buyer. Will hybrids? One of the reasons Detroit is in such difficulty is that consumers have been resisting the smaller, less powerful, less safe cars forced on the industry by fuel-efficiency mandates. Now Detroit would be forced to make even more of them.
If you think we have economic troubles today, consider the effects of nationalizing an industry of this size, but now run by bureaucrats issuing production quotas to fit five-year plans to meet politically mandated fuel-efficiency standards -- to lift us to the sunny uplands of the coming green utopia.
Republican minimalism -- saving the credit-issuing utilities -- certainly risks not doing enough. But the Democratic drift toward massive industrial policy threatens to grow into the guaranteed inefficiencies of command-economy maximalism.
In this crisis, we agree to suspend the invisible hand of Adam Smith -- but not in order to be crushed by the heavy hand of government.
06 November, 2008
Farm Subsidies
This was included in the video portion of Stossel's special, but I thought it was especially good so I am posting his article on food subsidies...
Who Will Run America?
John Stossel
Wednesday, November 05, 2008Publish Post
Some of you think you went to the polls yesterday to pick someone to run America.
"Who do you want to have run this country?" Chris Matthews asked repeatedly on MSNBC.
"One of these guys is going to be running the country," said Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News.
Really? Run the country?
"That has to be a joke -- or a misunderstanding," said George Mason University economist Walter Williams on my recent TV special, "John Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics".
Williams pointed out that the White House doesn't govern what happens in your house. And a president certainly cannot control the economy. We, all of us, run the country.
"Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good," Williams says.
The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.
"Most of life is outside the government sector," says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. "Most change in America doesn't come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn't come from government. Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up."
It's easy to find examples of government screwing up what it should have left alone.
Take farming. Every year politicians promise to save the family farm, and this year, Congress passed another $300-billion farm bill. More subsidies after generations of subsidies. John McCain opposed the bill, saying that it will "do more harm than good." But Barack Obama and most of Congress supported it.
"Small farms are important," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, told me.
"I don't think we want anybody in this country to starve," Rep. Randy Kuhl, a Republican from New York, added.
People would starve?
"They go out of business, and then they'd be forced to move elsewhere and find different jobs," Kuhl replied.
That's not starving. That's finding a different job.
"But if they don't have a job, then they're going to starve."
Please.
He and others in Congress also claim that subsidies "insure a food supply for this nation."
That's more nonsense.
It's the free market that "insures" the food supply. You may not know that most farmers get no subsidies. Growers of apples, bananas, broccoli, cabbage, cantaloupe, carrots, cauliflower, grapes, lemons, limes, lettuce, onions, oranges, peaches, pears, pineapples, potatoes, spinach, squash, tangerines, tomatoes and dozens of other crops are on their own. There's no cabbage crisis or pineapple panic.
The farm bill doesn't even keep its other promise: saving family farms.
It's why although Nebraska corn farmer Mike Korth received about half a million dollars in subsidies, he's still against the farm bill. "We sold this on the fact that this is helping the family farmer and the small beginning farmer. It's not. It's hurting them."
That's because most subsidies go to those that are best at manipulating government: the agribusiness giants. Small farms can't compete.
A Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study found that the more farm aid a county gets, the more likely it is to lose population.
So not only do farm subsidies cost every taxpayer $550 per year, they also raise food prices by paying farmers not to grow certain crops. Other crops are subsidized and exported, destroying the livelihoods of poor farmers in the Third World.
"This is just a crazy system," said the Cato Institute's David Boaz (www.cato.org). "It's left over from the 1930s, left over from the Depression. And it's a great example of how nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program."
Of course, without subsidies, some farms would go out of business. That's OK, says Walter Williams. It's the creative destruction that makes America strong.
"The guy who delivered ice to my house, he doesn't have a job because we have refrigerators. We're better off. We would have been held back if we had tried to save his job."
I said to Congresswoman Jackson Lee, "If this works so well, why don't we just subsidize everything?"
Her answer? "You don't want to push us."
How frightening is that?
Who Will Run America?
John Stossel
Wednesday, November 05, 2008Publish Post
Some of you think you went to the polls yesterday to pick someone to run America.
"Who do you want to have run this country?" Chris Matthews asked repeatedly on MSNBC.
"One of these guys is going to be running the country," said Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News.
Really? Run the country?
"That has to be a joke -- or a misunderstanding," said George Mason University economist Walter Williams on my recent TV special, "John Stossel's Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics".
Williams pointed out that the White House doesn't govern what happens in your house. And a president certainly cannot control the economy. We, all of us, run the country.
"Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good," Williams says.
The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.
"Most of life is outside the government sector," says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. "Most change in America doesn't come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn't come from government. Our world is going to get better and better, as long as we keep the politicians from screwing it up."
It's easy to find examples of government screwing up what it should have left alone.
Take farming. Every year politicians promise to save the family farm, and this year, Congress passed another $300-billion farm bill. More subsidies after generations of subsidies. John McCain opposed the bill, saying that it will "do more harm than good." But Barack Obama and most of Congress supported it.
"Small farms are important," Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, told me.
"I don't think we want anybody in this country to starve," Rep. Randy Kuhl, a Republican from New York, added.
People would starve?
"They go out of business, and then they'd be forced to move elsewhere and find different jobs," Kuhl replied.
That's not starving. That's finding a different job.
"But if they don't have a job, then they're going to starve."
Please.
He and others in Congress also claim that subsidies "insure a food supply for this nation."
That's more nonsense.
It's the free market that "insures" the food supply. You may not know that most farmers get no subsidies. Growers of apples, bananas, broccoli, cabbage, cantaloupe, carrots, cauliflower, grapes, lemons, limes, lettuce, onions, oranges, peaches, pears, pineapples, potatoes, spinach, squash, tangerines, tomatoes and dozens of other crops are on their own. There's no cabbage crisis or pineapple panic.
The farm bill doesn't even keep its other promise: saving family farms.
It's why although Nebraska corn farmer Mike Korth received about half a million dollars in subsidies, he's still against the farm bill. "We sold this on the fact that this is helping the family farmer and the small beginning farmer. It's not. It's hurting them."
That's because most subsidies go to those that are best at manipulating government: the agribusiness giants. Small farms can't compete.
A Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City study found that the more farm aid a county gets, the more likely it is to lose population.
So not only do farm subsidies cost every taxpayer $550 per year, they also raise food prices by paying farmers not to grow certain crops. Other crops are subsidized and exported, destroying the livelihoods of poor farmers in the Third World.
"This is just a crazy system," said the Cato Institute's David Boaz (www.cato.org). "It's left over from the 1930s, left over from the Depression. And it's a great example of how nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program."
Of course, without subsidies, some farms would go out of business. That's OK, says Walter Williams. It's the creative destruction that makes America strong.
"The guy who delivered ice to my house, he doesn't have a job because we have refrigerators. We're better off. We would have been held back if we had tried to save his job."
I said to Congresswoman Jackson Lee, "If this works so well, why don't we just subsidize everything?"
Her answer? "You don't want to push us."
How frightening is that?
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