Virginia Postrel has thoughts on overregulation, and the corresponding prospects for liberaltarianism.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
All Hail
Whenever I come back to LA, I’m reminded of all the things that I miss about California. But I’m also reminded of all the things that I don’t, particularly this week, with the budget mess. I didn’t want to move to Florida, and I still don’t want to stay there, but it’s getting a lot harder to want to move back here.
Shameless
Here’s a good round up of the corruption and collusion between Congress and the financial industry:
While Americans were asked to foot the bill—for generations—to bail out Wall Street executives from their sub-prime, mortgage-mad, derivatives driven, un-regulated market—politicians from all parties lined up to feed at the trough—knowing full well that it was these same companies’ bad business practices that placed our financial system at systemic risk.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is being paid by taxpayers to oversee these institutions, should return the money on principle or resign from the committee.
Don’t hold your breath.
Mendacity
Thoughts on the phony lead bullet issue. Don’t expect much of the media to call them on this bravo sierra, though. They hate guns, too. Unless they’re controlled by the goverment.
The Best
…and the brightest? Sounds like more credentialism to me.
Color me unimpressed. “The best and the brightest” are never really either the best or the brightest. Incidentally, I’ve never been as impressed by David Brooks as I’m supposed to be, either.
[Update a few minutes later]
Oh, and that goes triple for Bill Moyers.
You Don’t Say…
What would we do without psychologists?
“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.
Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mark Steyn has further thoughts.
Forget Liberaltarianism
What is the common ground between libertarians and conservatives? Looks like a reasonable list to me.
[Update a while later]
OK, we can’t get away from it. Jonah Goldberg on the perverse irony of liberaltaranism:
It is a sign of how profoundly statist a moment we are in that there’s this tempestuous debate — in a teapot to be sure — over whether libertarians, historically the purest of the sane anti-statists, should leave the nominally anti-statist party (the Right) in order to join the proudly statist party (the Left), when just about everyone agrees the net result of such a defection would be to make the anti-statist party significantly more statist. The only debate is whethere libertarians would make the statist party even marginally less statist or whether they would be rolled. And so far, the shaky consensus seems to be that the libertarians would get little to nothing for their defection while the country would (by libertarian standards) lose a great deal.
Of course, I’ve been opposed to this for years.
Time For A Tea Party?
This isn’t a scientific poll, but I think that there are a lot of angry people out there, particularly when the “stimulus” includes welfare and job retraining for millionaires, and Rasmussen reports that there aren’t very many people who approve the latest mortgage bailout. I know I’m one of them. Here’s an interview with the latter-day Samuel Adams (though I’m sure that there are many other Sons of Liberty, as there were then). I don’t really want to wait until July, though (though I understand that it’s kind of cold in Lake Michigan this time of year).
I think that there’s going to be a big backlash against this, and the polls would indicate it as well. As Jim Bennett notes:
The Ghost Shirt Democrats are doing their dance, but the vast herds of union-member Democrat-voting buffalo will never return to the plains, and [the] magic ghost shirts will not turn the ballots of angry voters into water [in] 2010 and 2012. Of course, the Republicans could still blow it, but even if they do, the Democrats have shown in a few short weeks that they have no idea how to govern the country, just to loot it. They will be replaced, if not by Republicans, then by somebody else.
We can only hope. And if the Republicans don’t get their act together, I hope that the answer is “somebody else.” I could use a real change, for the first time in my life, that results in less government, not more.
[Update a few minutes later]
Santelli/Kudlow 2010! (From comments)
We could do a lot worse, and always do.
[Update again a couple minutes later]
What are we going to demand? I haven’t really thought about it, but if we had the tea party today, I’d demand that Congress and the president rescind Porculus in toto, and come up with something that we are actually allowed to see and debate before anyone votes on it. Preferably in multiple bills, as the Founders intended.
[Update at 8 PM Pacific]
From my keyboard to their ears:
“I would like to say tonight that if the American people will let the Republicans back in charge, the 60% of this bill that won’t be spent until after the next election, we’ll cut it off and let it go to the Americans.”
Obviously, at this point, that’s the change that I’m waiting for. I might even vote Republican.
Infrastructure Change!
Apparently, Barack Obama is Bush III:
The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there’s not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina.
And there’s no outrage about it.
Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative. Even the Gulf’s fiercest advocates say they’re happy with the stimulus package, and their states have enough money for now to address their needs.
I guess that Barack Obama hates black people.
Foreign Policy Change!
But not much hope. The new administration is already selling out Israel at the UN. As Bayefsky notes, there should have been no US involvement in Durban in the first place. All we’ve done is legitimize a western-bashing process.