Obama Orders Regulatory Reform
When I saw this news item, my immediate question was, "what are they up to?" The President can't be serious. He and his statist minions love regulations! The bigger and more complex, the better!
Leftists love regulating the lives of others. They get a perverse pleasure from it. Go try to comment on your average lefty blog. You will quickly meet up with a giddy little potentate who has her twitchy finger on the delete button, ready to scold you for your offensive rightwing hatred.
Statism and Coercion Go Hand in Hand
Progressivism is not statism, but statism is the vehicle progressives have chosen to advance their agenda. Friedrich Hayek rightly observed that governmental grand schemes logically lead the government to become increasingly dictatorial. It must if it is to enforce the order. The people have got to cooperate for the schemes to work. The grander and more numerous the government projects, the more dictatorial coercion is required...
- Obama bars Boeing barred from expanding manufacturing to North Carolina
- The Federal Government forces you to buy into their healthcare scheme
- Taxpayer money is handed to Ethanol millionaires
- Congress bans the incandescent bulb
- In times of austerity in states, cities and private homes, a tentacular federal government stubbornly refuses to rein in programs, and instead recklessly increases spending and regulation
- The federal government responds to acts of terrorism by treating its own citizens as criminals
Here is what will work, for indeed it has always worked since time immemorial:
Remove the roadblocks to economic activity which are taxes, regulation, barriers to trade, and cheap, unstable money. (John Tamney - An Entirely Predictable Economic Dip)Our Economic Emperors Have No Clothes
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke admits he doesn't "have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting." He is only our latest economic emperor revealed as having no clothes.
It apparently takes a tenured Princeton economics department chairman not to understand what the average Joe knows only too well - that an $800 billion-plus stimulus that didn't stimulate on top of Washington turning the mortgage industry into a welfare program isn't something the jobs market can easily recover from. (IBD - Fall of Economic High Priests)
So, What Would Fix It?
As economic historian Thomas Woods points out in his book on the financial crisis, "Meltdown," a few bankruptcies of too-big-to-fail firms would do more to jolt the financial sector "into being sensible and cautious instead of reckless and irresponsible than all the regulatory tinkering in the world."
A free economy doesn't need an elite of government high priests named Bernanke or Greenspan or Rubin or Summers to reach and maintain the greatness that has marked most of U.S. economic history. It needs protection from such arrogant figures. (IBD - Fall of Economic High Priests)
