Category Archives: Economics

Not Fascist Enough

Naomi Klein is complaining about the president:

Obama, it’s worth remembering, also came to office with the big banks on their knees — it took real effort not to nationalize them. Once again, if Obama had dared to use the power that was handed to him by history, he could have mandated the banks to provide the loans for factories to be retrofitted and new green infrastructure to be built. Instead he declared that the government shouldn’t tell the failed banks how to run their businesses. Green businesses report that it’s harder than ever to get a loan.

Imagine if these three huge economic engines — the banks, the auto companies, the stimulus bill — had been harnessed to a common green vision. If that had happened, demand for a complementary energy bill would have been part of a coherent transformative agenda.

Imagine. It’s easy if you try.

Rogues’ Gallery

Here is a list of the bribes that Harry Reid paid with our money to buy votes on this monstrosity. At least lobbyists use their own money. As Mark Steyn writes:

You can’t even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn’t ‘border on immoral’: it drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

And when you see things like this, the blood just boils:

Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.)

—Exemption from the non-profit excise tax for Michigan insurers. Michigan and Nebraska were the only two states so exempted.

Is such blatant favoritism to particular states even constitutional? Is there precedent for it? Don’t other states have a right to protest this inequality under the law?

[Update a few minutes later]

Five reasons it still may not pass. Let’s hope.

[Late morning update]

Why the Reid bill is unconstitutional. Even without the payoffs to Michigan and Nebraska.

If anything resembling this planned man-caused disaster passes, I expect to see lots of legal challenges, many of them successful.

[Early evening update]

The ostensible beneficiaries of Senator Nelson’s corruption don’t seem to be very happy about it, especially after he tried to deflect blame onto others:

Gov. Dave Heineman “contacted me and he said this is another unfunded federal mandate and it’s going to stress the state budget, and I agreed with him,” the Nebraska Democrat said. “I said to the leader and others that this is something that has to be fixed. I didn’t participate in the way it was fixed.”

But Heineman expressed anything but gratitude, saying he had nothing to do with the compromise and calling the overhaul bill “bad news for Nebraska and bad news for America.”

“Nebraskans did not ask for a special deal, only a fair deal,” Heineman said in a statement Sunday.

That criticism is only a taste of what Nelson has received since announcing Saturday that he would become the 60th vote needed to advance the landmark legislation.

I wonder if this could influence his vote in the final after reconciliation? Unfortunately, it will be hard to change without looking as craven as he undoubtedly is, unless what comes out of conference is different.

Oh, and here’s a perfect example of the false choice fallacy that I talked about last week:

The Nebraska Democratic Party chairman called Nelson’s decision “courageous” and dismissed Republican criticism of it.

“Whatever he did, they would be critical,” Vic Covalt said. “They have no program and they have nothing to offer us other than more of the same.”

Just as I said:

There is a variation on this fallacy, in fact. It goes: There is a crisis; something must be done! What we propose to do is something. Therefore, it must be done!

This invalid argument is otherwise known as false choice, of course, because the alternative to the particular something being proposed is not nothing (even if one accepts the initial premise that there is a crisis about which something must be done) — it is a variety of other somethings, some of which may be the something that is actually key to solving the problem, even if their own is not necessarily.

We saw this last January when many of the same people promoting AGW hysteria also used it to ram through the failed “stimulus” bill without reading it. It is now being used to justify taking over the sixth of the US economy represented by the health care industry. All the while, these people have been lambasting their political opponents who offer more sensible alternatives as proposing that we do “nothing.”

Liars.

More Exploding Watermelons

Here’s the latest from the fruit salad, over at The Independent:

The most progressive US president in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speaker-phone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that could challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation that put a man on the Moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantle of a religion.

I’m long on record of opposing the idiocy of inappropriate comparisons of the crisis du jour to Apollo. Is he really comparing a massive technological achievement of engineering to “summoning a collective will” (i.e., social engineering)? Apparently.

And when it comes to “taking on the mantle of a religion,” I can only suggest that he and his gaze long into a mirror.

I Love The Sound

…of exploding watermelons in the morning:

Polly Toynbee is blaming the whole fiasco on false consciousness.

…Sometimes we’re inclined to dismiss Polly as a loveable comedy figure, what with her lovely house in Tuscany contrasting so amusingly with her prolier-than-thou politics, and the never ending japesomeness of her deft, lighter-than-air prose.

But you know what? When she reveals her true colours, as she does here, I think she’s really, really scary. Her whole article teeters on the brink of demanding an eco-fascist world government to save us all from ourselves.

Save us from people wanting to save us from ourselves.

The Force Of The Gore Effect Is Strong In This One

Kyopenhagen abounded in irony, as all of these circuses do, but I found it quite delicious that Obama (and Pelosi, and many other DC denizens) had to rush home from a global warming conference to avoid getting shut out by an approaching blizzard* in the nation’s capital.

I would also note that, while I’m agnostic, I like the old phrase, “Men make plans, and God laughs.” This may put a dagger through the black heart of the health-care disaster, or at least its being passed by Christmas, which means that it may be dead for good (or at least this session, which will buy a lot of time after next year’s elections). But I won’t consider it over until it’s over.

* Yes, I do know the difference between climate and weather. When it’s warm, it’s climate; when it’s cold, it’s weather. Thanks for asking.

Thoughts On Corporatism

From Ross Douthat, and Jonah Goldberg, which is on full display in the health-care debacle, with the weird and awkward bear hug between Washington and the insurance companies:

If you want to know why business takes such an interest in Washington, the answer can be found in your low-flow toilet, in the warning labels adorning your cars, in your 8 zillion page tax returns. It can be found while you wait on hold trying to get a human to answer your questions about your health insurance. And the answer is most certainly somewhere in your box of cereal, made with grains subsidized by Uncle Sam and coated in sugar that has no business being grown in the United States of America. Corporations meddle in Washington because Washington meddles with them.

It is simply naive to believe that a businessman will have no interest in politics when politicians have taken a great interest in him. And it is grotesquely unfair to assume that businesspeople are corrupt simply because they want to support politicians less inclined to hurt them.

Yes, Bill Gates learned that lesson the hard way.

Happy About Kyopenhagen

That’s what the Club For Growth is:

“Like most Americans, I feared President Obama went to Copenhagen to sign a binding, job-killing, economic suicide pact.

“I am greatly relieved that the last-minute agreement President Obama negotiated is being widely described as ‘meaningful.’ When politicians call something ‘meaningful,’ that means it isn’t.

“Without even reading the accord, pro-growth, limited government conservatives today can celebrate the word, ‘meaningful.’ Today that adjective probably saved thirty million jobs.”

Yes, it was the best possible outcome from a blatherfest like that.

Incoherent

Julian Sanchez is as confused about the rationale for the current health-care deform as I am:

So we’re eliminating the rationale for the role private insurance companies play in our system, but insisting that it continue to revolve around them and, even better, handing them an enormous subsidy. What we’ve eliminated is the counterweight designed to check costs, because that part, according to a logic I completely fail to fathom, is especially socialist.

What’s remarkable about this is how naked and brazen it is. That is, I can’t come up with any remotely coherent pretext for thinking this particular policy combination makes sense on any set of background assumptions or values. (Which isn’t to say the same system with the public option was much more coherent.) Contemplate how extraordinary that is: There’s almost always at least some fig leaf of an ideological principle or an economic argument strung up in front of even the most naked interest group grab. But nobody seems to be even pretending this compromise amounts to anything but an open bribe to the very insurers whose existence it renders unjustifiable.

Also, if I hear one more economically ignorant moron tell me that we “need a public option to provide competition for insurance companies,” superheated steam will come out my ears. This is a phrase so absurd that I don’t know why its utterers don’t melt down in the sheer incandescent idiocy of it. If there isn’t competition in the insurance business, it is because (as is always the case in which there is no competition) there is some government policy that prevents it. Fix that. Don’t set up a health-care DMV to “compete” at taxpayer expense.

[Mid-afternoon update]

One of the deranged but prevailing myths among Democrats is that they lost the Congress in 1994 because they didn’t pass HillaryCare, when in reality, their loss was due to a combination of their attempt to do so, plus the “assault” weapons ban, and other misbegotten legislation. But because they continue to indulge themselves in this bizarre fantasy, they continue to equally imagine that their key to political success is ramming this monstrosity through. Sean Trende makes a devastating case against that lunacy as well, and explains why it would actually be political suicide for them. Which almost, but not quite, makes me want to see it pass.

[Bumped]