George Will: Dodd Frank, Capitalism, & Banks Too Big To Fail

Capitalism — which is, as Milton Friedman tirelessly insisted, a profit and loss system — is subverted by [banks deemed "Too Big To Fail"], which socializes losses while leaving profits private. And which enhances the profits of those whose losses it socializes. TBTF is a double moral disaster: It creates moral hazard by encouraging risky behavior, and it delegitimizes capitalism by validating public cynicism about its risk-reward ratios.

George Will, Too Big To Maintain?, Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2012

Amen. Do read George Will's exceptional column, discussing what Romney referred to in the last debate, that the Dodd-Frank law "constitutes “the biggest kiss that’s been given to — to New York banks I’ve ever seen.”

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These NRO People Are Nuts

I didn't think it possible that the right could lose to Obama in 2012, even with all the dark forces of the MSM arrayed against us and awaiting their marching orders. But the last two months of flame throwing against Gingrich, and indeed, to a lesser extent, any candidate not named Romney has left me wondering whether we can yet pull defeat from the jaws of victory. Precious little of what is coming from the right leaning pundits has been reasoned criticism. To the contrary, its largely been overheated hyperbole of the ilk used by the left to demonize and delegitimize Sarah Palin.

I mean, NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru is telling me today how I, as a Catholic, should see Gingrich's extra-marital affairs. It's bullshit dressed up as a papal bull. It really has to be read to be believed.

According to Father Ramesh, as Christians, we should vote against Gringrich to spare him from the temptation of bimbo eruptions in high office. Further, if we vote for Gingrich, it will mean we condone adultery. And lastly, we should pick somebody other than Gingrich because his affairs could well doom him in a general election against the morally superior Obama. Morally superior Obama? Really????

Hey Ramesh, how about doing a quick calculation on Obama's sins. By my count, he violates the 1st Commandment every time he looks in the mirror. He lives to violate the 8th Commandment with his class warfare rhetoric and his focus on stealing the wealth of anyone who is moderately successful. With his disingenuous army of straw men and his habit of projecting on Republicans the absolute worst of motives, he violates the 9th Commandment. And he has spent the entire last year not as Commander-in-Chief, but as Campaigner in Chief. This joker has taken actions that solely benefit his reelection bid at the cost to our the country (Iraq, Afghanistan, Keystone Pipeline, etc.) He covets power and the Presidency the way a fat kid covets twinkies. Worse, his entire campaign hinges on him being able to get enough Americans to so covet the money of the "wealthy" that, on that basis alone, they will vote for him in November. Now that is insidious. Weighing all of that on Ramesh's exquisitely tuned scales of morality, give me a former adulterer any day. Oh, and somebody better go dig up former PRESIDENT Grover Cleveland and warn him that people just won't vote for a Republican with adultery known to be in his background.

Can any of these pundits-turned-hit-men just stop for a moment, take a deep breath - and then HOLD IT UNTIL AFTER THE F****** CONVENTION. Has a single one of these crap-for-brains people ever read up on the 1964 election?

The NRO, but for Jonah Goldberg and Andrew McCarthy, has been dead in the middle of this pack of right wing cannibals. Now the NRO has two of its authors - Brian Bolduc and Conrad Black - waxing lyrical about a brokered convention where the delegates get to nominate a Republican not among the burned and broken bodies of the current aspirants. Really, are these people bat-shit insane? Do they realize how splintered and mortally wounded the Republican Party would be if their favored scenario plays out? Are their heads so deeply implanted in their own asses that they have lost all touch with reality? The last time Republicans were so split that they had a brokered convention, they ended up with Thomas Dewey as the nominee to go up against the then incredibly unpopular Harry Truman in 1948. Hey guys, how did that one work out?

If we manage to lose this election - and every day, thanks to the NRO and their ilk, I come to believe more and more that we can - then America is toast. I agree with Krauthammer on this one - "[i]f Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return . . ."

That said, and regardless of whether we win or lose, I really think that we of a conservative bent need to consider trading the NRO, George Will, Ann Coulter, Kathleen Parker and Jennifer Rubin to the Democrats for a couple of first and second round draft choices to be named. Hell, let's see if we can get a good deal for them from MSNBC. Gingrich may have broken the 7th Commandment, but these vipers in our midst have made a cottage industry of violating the 11th Commandment - and they have done so with all the vitriol and intellectual dishonesty that we can expect from the left wing MSM. That really is an unforgivable sin.

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Levin On The Right-Wing Pundits' Insane War On Gingrich

This from Mark Levin, writing at the Right Scoop:

While Mark Levin is on vacation, he’s taken a little time to pen his thoughts on the ongoing disgusting attacks aimed at Newt Gingrich by those on the right, including Ann Coulter, George Will, and the NRO:
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Is Newt really Satan?

If you read the comments on some conservative sites you might think so.

Newt Gingrich is not my first choice for the GOP nomination. I have said if I were voting today, I would vote for either Michelle Bachmann or Rick Santorum. But I don’t feel the need to smear Newt, either.

My friend Ann Coulter says she would vote for Ron Paul over Newt Gingrich. Really? Despite his racism, anti-Semiticism, hate-America first pronouncements, 9/11 truther nuttiness, etc., etc.? What about this?

http://www.jbs.org/birchtube/viewvideo/1007/constitution/ron-paul-at-the-50th-anniversary-of-jbs

What about this?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2011-12-21/ron-paul-racist-newsletters/52147878/1

What about this?

http://thedaleygator.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/nutbag-ron-paul-bush-administration-reacted-with-glee-after-911/

What about this?

http://www.textfiles.com/politics/ron_paul.txt

The list goes on and on. Coulter is undoubtedly aware of all of this. How can she or any sensible person, let alone conservative, advocate for or defend this? She backed Chris Christie, telling me that if Mitt Romney is nominated he will lose as John McCain did, and it will be my fault (along with Rush’s and Sean’s). Now, she insists that only Romney can win and the conservatives in the field cannot. Perplexing.

George Will is slamming away at Newt again today, having previously suggested he was a Marxist. A Marxist? Is this the same Will who supported George H. W. Bush and Howard Baker over Ronald Reagan in 1979? Somehow he not only missed the Reagan Revolution, but he initially doubted it and opposed it. Your judgment, George, does not match your conceit, with all due respect.

Over at NR, the hits keep coming. My friend Ramesh Ponnuru is waxing on priest-like about Newt and his Catholic faith. It’s a very odd piece. But Ramesh backs Romney, not Rick Santorum, who is not only Catholic but is clearly a more reliable conservative than Romney. Perplexing.

Most of Newt’s attackers have announced for Romney or are at least fronting for him, overlooking or excusing most of Romney’s deceits — which continue to this day and most recently involve his flip-flopping on the Iraq War. Moreover, Will has not said who he supports, having previously backed Mitch Daniels. No doubt Michelle Bachmann is just too wacky and inexperienced for his tastes, much as Reagan was too old and unsteady back in 1979.

Having consulted a number of friends and colleagues from the Reagan era, they agree with me that we’ve not seen this kind of daily attack on a legitimate Republican primary candidate in modern times, despite Newt’s weaknesses and faults. And most are disgusted by it.

Boy, does Levin have this one right. To call this disgusting is an understatement. In truth, these attacks are more vitriolic than what we saw directed at Sarah Palin by the left. If you haven't seen George Will's column today at WaPo - I am not going to link such trash - it is insanity on steroids. He proclaims that Gingrich is the "anti-conservative" (I assume that is a play on the "anti-Christ") because Gingrich wants to put an end to judicial activism. If Will's name wasn't at the top, I would have thought it written by Paul Krugman or Glen Greenwald.

I e-mailed the following to Will this afternoon:

Your hatred of Gingrich has been palpable from the start of the campaign. It has clearly clouded your judgment.

Conservatives have been shaking their fists impotently at the Courts for their judicial activism - their Politburo like unilateral amendments to the Constitution working fundamental changes to our nation - for the past fifty years. Heretofore, the only solution to the problem was thought to be electing Presidents who will appoint judges grounded in originalism. That has been less than successful. Enter Newt Gingrich, who has completely changed the paradigm on this critical issue. He wants to make a systemic fix that will permanently restore the Constitutional balance between the three branches of our government as such balance was envisioned by the Founders. Andrew McCarthy and Judge Mukasey certainly support that. Yet you would label the effort anti-conservative merely because it comes from Gingrich?

I've lost all respect for you at this point Mr. Will. Your determination to excoriate Gingrich at all cost has descended into farce with your most recent column.

Just out of curiosity, do you have any respect for the 11th Commandment?.

A hat tip to Daily Gator for this post, as well as a congrats for being cited by Levin. Visit the Daily Gator's site for some additional videos detailing the pundit's war on Gingrich.

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Will On A Roll

What superb responses - and here he is at the CPAC Conference







(H/T Hot Air here and here)

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Hayek And Will On Socialist Thugocracies

Speaking of the rise of the socialist state, with its forced nationalizations and growth in power of the unions in post WWII Britain, author FA Hayek wrote:

The most serious development is the growth of a measure of arbitrary administrative coercion and the progressive destruction of the cherished foundations of British liberty, the Rule of Law . . . [T]he attempts at economic planning under the Labour government carried it to the point where it is doubtful whether it can be said that the Rule of Law prevails in Britain. . . . It is a despotism exercised by a thoroughly honest and conscientious bureaucracy for what they sincerely believe is the good of the country. . . .

Our modern day Mr. Hayek may well be George Will, who is emerging as the most cogent of observers of the Obama regime and its emerging practice of heavy handed tactics that mirror those which occurred in post WWII Britain. As Mr. Will observes, our new President is ruling this country with "a tincture of lawlessness."

This from Geoge Will, writing at the Washington Post:

. . . In February, California's Democratic-controlled Legislature, faced with a $42 billion budget deficit, trimmed $74 million (1.4 percent) from one of the state's fastest-growing programs, which provides care for low-income and incapacitated elderly people and which cost the state $5.42 billion last year. The Los Angeles Times reports that "loose oversight and bureaucratic inertia have allowed fraud to fester."

But the Service Employees International Union collects nearly $5 million a month from 223,000 caregivers who are members. And the Obama administration has told California that unless the $74 million in cuts are rescinded, it will deny the state $6.8 billion in stimulus money.

Such a federal ukase (the word derives from czarist Russia; how appropriate) to a state legislature is a sign of the administration's dependency agenda -- maximizing the number of people and institutions dependent on the federal government. For the first time, neither sales nor property nor income taxes are the largest source of money for state and local governments. The federal government is.

The SEIU says the cuts violate contracts negotiated with counties. California officials say the state required the contracts to contain clauses allowing pay to be reduced if state funding is.

Anyway, the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler's secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims -- and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors' contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

Among Chrysler's lenders, some servile banks that are now dependent on the administration for capital infusions tugged their forelocks and agreed. Some hedge funds among Chrysler's lenders that are not dependent were vilified by the president because they dared to resist his demand that they violate their fiduciary duties to their investors, who include individuals and institutional pension funds.

The Economist says the administration has "ridden roughshod over [creditors'] legitimate claims over the [automobile companies'] assets. . . . Bankruptcies involve dividing a shrunken pie. But not all claims are equal: some lenders provide cheaper funds to firms in return for a more secure claim over the assets should things go wrong. They rank above other stakeholders, including shareholders and employees. This principle is now being trashed." Tom Lauria, a lawyer representing hedge fund people trashed by the president as the cause of Chrysler's bankruptcy, asked that his clients' names not be published for fear of violence threatened in e-mails to them.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program, which has not yet been used for its supposed purpose (to purchase such assets from banks), has been the instrument of the administration's adventure in the automobile industry. TARP's $700 billion, like much of the supposed "stimulus" money, is a slush fund the executive branch can use as it pleases. This is as lawless as it would be for Congress to say to the IRS: We need $3.5 trillion to run the government next year, so raise it however you wish -- from whomever, at whatever rates you think suitable. Don't bother us with details.

. . . The Obama administration's agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of "economic planning" and "social justice" that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

Read the entire article. I could not agree more. Not only is the Obama administration displaying overt corruption, but it is of a kind that will have long term ramifications. Those industries in which Obama has inserted his malign influence may well find the cure more toxic than their original economic problems, particularly when they try to raise capital and lure private investment.

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Socialist Laboratories

I have long maintained that the UK is a laboratory for the ills of socialism when it is is integrated into a Western democracy. George Will, today, identifies a second - California.
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This from George Will, noting the descent of California into a heavilly unionized, grossly overspent and over-taxed leftist . . . well, 'utopia' would not be the right word:

. . . National economic revival is being impeded because one-eighth of the nation's population lives in a state that is driving itself into permanent stagnation. California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency.

Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states contiguous to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating in those states. For four consecutive years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in. California's business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state's. In the last decade, net out-migration of Americans has been 1.4 million. California is exporting talent while importing Mexico's poverty. The latter is not California's fault; the former is.

If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger's less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.

Liberal orthodoxy has made the state dependent on a volatile source of revenues -- high income tax rates on the wealthy. In 2006, the top 1 percent of earners paid 48 percent of the income taxes. California's income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, its business conditions among the worst, as measured by 16 variables directly influenced by the Legislature. Unemployment, the nation's fourth highest, is 11.2 percent.

. . . Flinching from serious budget cutting, and from confronting public employees unions, some Californians focus on process questions. They devise candidate-selection rules designed to diminish the role of parties, thereby supposedly making more likely the election of "moderates" amenable to even more tax increases.

But what actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.

California has become liberalism's laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed. The state is a slow learner and hence will remain a drag on the nation's economy. But it will be a net benefit to the nation if the federal government and other state governments profit from California's negative example . . .

Read the entire article.

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A Sophistical Rhetorician Inebriated With The Exuberance Of His Own Verbosity

The above title is a quote of Benjamin Disraeli as he described William Gladstone and used by George Will in his column today to explain why Obama is vastly underpforming his party brand. Powerline also offers some related thoughts.
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This from George Will writing in the NY Post:

As the presidential candidates enter the three-month sprint to November, Barack Obama must be wondering: If that didn't do it, what will?

"That" is his Berlin speech. "It" is assuage anxieties about his understanding of the need to supplement diplomacy with military force.

. . . But polls taken since his trip abroad don't indicate that Obama succeeded in altering the oddest aspect of this campaign: Measured against his party's surging strength, he's dramatically underperforming. Surely this is related to anxieties about his thin resume regarding national security, the thinnest of any major party nominee since Wendell Wilkie's in 1940. But it also might be related to fatigue from too much of his eloquence, which is beginning to sound formulaic and perfunctory.

Even an eloquent politician can become, as Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone, "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity."

Does Obama have the sort of adviser a candidate most needs - someone sufficiently unenthralled to tell him when he has worked one pedal on the organ too much? If so, he should be told: Enough, already, with the we-are-who-we-have-been-waiting-for rhetorical cotton candy that elevates narcissism to a political philosophy.

And no more locutions such as "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship." If they meant anything in Berlin, they meant that Obama wanted Berliners to know that he is proudly cosmopolitan. Cosmopolitanism isn't, however, an asset for US presidential candidates. Least of all is it an asset for Obama, who needs to seem comfortable with America's vibrant and very un-European patriotism.

Otherwise, "citizen of the world" and "global citizenship" are, strictly speaking, nonsense. Citizenship is defined by legal and loyalty attachments to a particular political entity with a distinctive regime and culture. Neither the world nor the globe is such an entity.

. . . Sweeping changes are almost always consequences of calamities - often of wars, sometimes of people determined to "remake the world." Wise voters hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery.

Read the entire article. It is a good one this week.

On a related note, Paul at Powerline has an insightful post on how Obama pointing out that Obama's reliance on rhetoric and race to win the primary is ill serving him in the general election.

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Earmarks, MDS and Irony

George Will has long been a staunch opponent of John McCain. With respect to that, it is ironic that Will, in his column today, posits that lack of fiscal discipline, and particularly earmarks, cost Republican's the '06 election and will be the single most significant reason why Republican's remain the minority party.


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This today from George Will:

Coconut Road near Fort Myers looks like any other concrete ribbon near housing developments, golf courses and shopping malls in this state's booming southwest. But like another fragrant slab of recent pork, the $223 million "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska, Coconut Road leads to somewhere darkly fascinating. It runs straight into Washington's earmark culture of waste, corruption and anti-constitutional deviousness.

Today the road ends at a chain-link fence, beyond which flows the river of traffic on Interstate 75. The earmark that would have built an interchange to connect Coconut Road to I-75 was, like the bridge, smudged with the fingerprints of Alaska's Republican Rep. Don Young, who was chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee in 2005. But this story involves more than one political vulgarian's wretched excesses. It also illustrates how Republicans earned their most recent and coming drubbings.

On July 29, 2005, the House and Senate passed legislation granting Lee County's request for $10 million for "widening and improvements for I-75" to facilitate evacuations during hurricanes. But on Feb. 19, 2005, Young had been in Bonita Springs near Fort Myers, collecting $40,000 in campaign funds. The contributors included developer Daniel Aronoff, a prolific supporter of Republicans and owner of about 4,000 acres along Coconut Road. The value of that land would be enhanced if Coconut Road were connected to I-75 by an interchange that would be adjacent to 1,200 of Aronoff's acres.

When the legislation reached the president on Aug. 10, 2005, the language about widening I-75 had been mysteriously deleted and replaced by "Coconut Rd. interchange I-75/Lee County." So $10 million was to be spent for a project that neither the House nor the Senate voted for, that Lee County did not want, and that someone unknown wrote into the legislation. But the Constitution says: "Every bill . . . shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate" before it becomes law.

Young at first said that the local House member, Connie Mack, asked for the change. Mack denied that. In January 2006, Young, who subsequently changed his tune, warned Lee County that it could not spend the $10 million for the widening project it requested. Young says that local residents requested the interchange project instead. But many residents, not including the developers who are Young's benefactors, oppose it for environmental and traffic reasons.

. . . [Senator Tom] Coburn demands "a select committee, comprised of members of both the House and Senate," because "secret, improper and unauthorized changes to congressionally passed legislation call into question the integrity of our entire constitutional and legislative process."

. . . In his State of the Union address, President Bush vowed to veto any appropriation bill "that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half." Coburn tartly notes that although Congress hardly needs 5,500 earmarks -- half of last year's total -- the president's goal would be met if Republicans themselves quit earmarking. That fact goes far to explain the Republicans' current and future minority status.

Read the entire article. The irony here, of course, is that while Will has been a vociferous opponent of McCain, it has been only McCain who has vowed to impose fiscal discipline on government and to veto any bill containing earmarks. In many ways, McCain Derangement Syndrome is a mysterious illness indeed, apparently making the otherwise rational person unable to come to grips with reality.

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Interesting News From Around the Web

Brazil discovers huge oil reserves off its coast. Good. Brazil says OPEC needs to bring down the price per barrel of oil. Great.

The UN claims that “the world’s scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice” with the release of the IPCC report claiming that humans are destroying the world through global warming. It would be nice if that "one voice" could get the facts right, at least in the first paragraph of its report. As to this one voice claim . . .

A use of the police force to crush dissent . . . by Democrats in Oklahoma. There is no force in America more committed to the stifling of free speech then the neo-liberals that make up today's Democratic Party.

George Will takes a look at some of the reprehensible company John Edwards keeps and tells us why lawyers such as Milberg Weiss give the legal profession a horrible image.

What a great juxtaposition. Gateway Pundit tallies the numbers from al Jazeera and another source to show just how successful the surge has been in Iraq: "violence in Iraq is down by 50%; civilian casualties in Iraq are down by 60%; Baghdad casualties are down by 75%; Basra violence is down by 90%; [and] terrorist attacks in Iraq are down by 80%." Compare that with the Washington Post, which has been running a near news blackout on good news from Iraq over the past several months, only to tell us today that President Bush is regaining his bearings - and they can't seem to grasp why. As WaPo puts it in their page 1 article: "In many ways, [President Bush's] shifting political fortunes may owe as much to the absence of bad news as to any particular good news."

Actually, the WaPo did include a bit of the good news out of Iraq today . . . on page A14. "U.S. officials on Sunday declared a 55 percent drop in attacks since the launch of an offensive nine months ago . . ." They also note that bombs across Iraq killed at least 20 people, highlighting the country's continuing security threats. Al Qadea is in tatters, but it still has a bite. Intelligence from the community led to a find of 20 vehicles rigged for suicide bombs just last week.

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