It sure isn’t Keynesian. That restraining order can’t come soon enough.

The latest lesson for our betters in Washington, from Bill Whittle.

I find it amusing that the morons who drafted up the health-care deform couldn’t find room, in over 2000 pages, for a severability clause.

In the banking profession and the government. We already knew that both administrations were lawless when it came to immigration and voting-rights enforcement. Why should this be any different?

Was it a Cloward-Piven strategy?

Maybe, but I tend to go with Occam’s Razor — don’t attribute to conspiracy what can be easily explained by incompetence. Or its corollary, Clark’s Law (J. Porter Clark, that is) — any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. I think that the original instigator of the expression was spam, but this seems to fit as well.

Stop bashing business, Mr. President:

A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. Our dream was to create (memo to DNC activists: that’s build, not take or coerce) a new kind of home-improvement center catering to do-it-yourselfers. The concept was to have a wide assortment, a high level of service, and the lowest pricing possible.

We opened the front door in 1979, also a time of severe economic slowdown. Yet today, Home Depot is staffed by more than 325,000 dedicated, well-trained, and highly motivated people offering outstanding service and knowledge to millions of consumers.

If we tried to start Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that our business would never get off the ground, much less thrive.

Wreckers.

To read the comments here, it sounds like we’ve reached second-world levels of bureaucracy. It’s like the whole system is just grinding to a halt. And of course, California has become worse than most places, with little prospect for change, given that the electorate continues to go downhill as the productive leave.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Texas model:

What does Austin know that Washington doesn’t? At its simplest: Don’t overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, “Open for Business.”

It’s amazing what can happen when you have political leaders who understand, and don’t hate business.

At some point, people are going to get tired of being punished for success and doing the right thing while others are rewarded for failure. I remember a couple years ago, when the financial crisis had first hit, and my next-door neighbor commented that he’d done what he was supposed to do, but he was paying for the mortgages of people who hadn’t. This is not sustainable.

…for China. This is one of the (many) reasons that I don’t worry much about them dominating us in space.