Those who are pro-choice, or in favor of allowing same-sex marriage, aka Democrats, also tend to be more willing to regulate business, and enforce anti-trust regulations designed to see that nobody got to be too big. They also are far more inclined to require private enterprise to do things that protect the environment.
Unbridled free-market economics were largely out of favor between the time the New Deal started and Ronald Reagan became President in 1981. Since then, however, we’ve celebrated the market. Our leaders have generally held the view that government regulation was bad, and that we’ve had way too much of it.
That was certainly the prevailing philosophy over the last eight years, but in the end, things didn’t turn out so well.
The stock market crashed last fall, the federal budget deficit is higher than imagination, and John Maynard Keynes seems to have been resurrected from the dead.
The federal government has poured hundreds of billions into the market to try and stimulate it back to life, and is gearing up to pour in nearly a trillion more. Yet so far the patient still isn’t breathing very well, and the doctors are getting more worried.
Those dwindling few who still hold to the old-time free market religion think the sure cure for everything is tax cuts. In my view, they are obviously people with limited knowledge of the potholes on I-94.
But while it is easy and popular these days to expose the silliest of the Bush administration’s economic banalities, Dr. Peter Ubel has tried to something deeper and more controversial in his half-sobering, half-entertaining book, Free Market Madness. The good doctor is not just challenging the right of the Enrons of this earth to steal our pension funds. He’s questioning to what extent we ought to be trusted with free choice at all.
As a physician, he constantly sees patients who don’t exercise when they should and don’t eat healthy food even though they know how important that is to their welfare. For a moment, I thought I was talking to my doctor. Libertarians might say that an individual has a perfect right to do with their own body what they want to. Trouble is, we don’t live in a vacuum.
If I lose my health insurance, get diabetes from eating poorly, and have to be taken to an emergency room, I may well cost society many thousands of dollars. Smokers have cost the government billions. The question is, what do we do about it? The good doctor is too smart to suggest any simple solutions. Instead, he is in favor of what he calls “carefully calibrated restrictions on our freedoms.” Sounds good in principle.
That is, as long as I get to do the calibrating.
Most economists agree on the general outline of the principles for a successful economic stimulus plan. It should be "Timely, temporary and targeted." Little of the plan that was passed in HR1 yesterday fits those goals.
When Jack Lessenberry suggests that fixing I-94 would be a general good, it's hard to argue with him. As to whether it is a good economic stimulus, that's another question, and more debatable. As to whether millions going to Sexually Transmitted Disease prevention, or the National Endwoment for the Arts, federal childcare supports, or the Smithsonian Institution; well, that's just a bad, billion-dollar joke.
Nearly a whopping third of the stimulus package goes to wealth redistribution in the form of unemplyoment benefits and antipoverty programs.
Only 5% goes to the kind of infrastructure spending that Mr. Lessenberry implied with his "I-94" comment.
We see in this gigantic package a bill that serves as more of a 40-year goodie list for Democratic Party interests than real economic stimulus. The Wall Street Journal estimated that about 12 cents of every one of the 825-billion stimulus dollars goes to somethng like real stimulus, and of that much of the stimulus is not "timely" at all:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123310466514522309.html
This ecomonic stimulus bill is not the Democrats' first slap in the face of employment-producing businesses. The cost of employing anybody just went up, with the farcical "Lilly Ledbetter" pay-equity act. And the costs of doing business for the Detroit automakers may be going up with California's imposition of its own state standards on fuel economy throughout wider parts of the rest of the nation.
In the end, Jack Lessenberry wonders if we might be in an era that demands some compromises on our personal freedoms. The freedoms that Jack Lessenberry seems ready to compormise on, are mostly economic ones. Follow the money, I say, Jack.
But please don't anybody suggest to Jack that we need to compromise our notions on things like telecom data collection, or the rights of terrorists captured by our military in foreign fighting, or the rights of New York Times reporters publishing leaked information on terrorist surveillance. Those are the kinds of inviolable rights that I suspect the ACLU is never going to be willing to compromise. Compromise on personal freedoms, it appears, is not just a one-way street; liberals think it is the only street.
Posted by: Anonymous | January 29, 2009 at 04:04 PM
What is amazing and revealing about the economic meltdown is how so many experts from the business sector, academic areana and the political camps are all lost at sea..
None of these interests have a clue nor do any of these folks have any real time solutions and recommendations on how to slow down the train wreck...
Truth is the what we are observing in our leadership tier and ranks is a bunch of confused people. All of their expertise, experience, seasoned knowledge, inside information none of it amounts to anything of substance and value..
The so called masters of the universe are taking an arse kicking...
WSJ the premiere business publication was invisible during the Madoff run...All the great academic types from MIT, Uof Chicago, etc were MIA none of these people who for years pretended to know everything now look like ballons in the air...
Posted by: Thrasher | January 30, 2009 at 10:12 AM