Occupy Wall Street? You might as well send them a check.
The only way to get business out of government is to make government smaller. There is no “government” solution to the government problem.
Update: I see comments here and there around the www about how messed up these kids are. I dunno – Wall Street pretty much owns government. Aside from the part the Drug Cartels control. They got the problem right. They got the answer wrong. What they want is smaller government. Something no faction in America favors. They all have their pet projects for improving moral and social conditions that REQUIRE Big Intrusive Government (that would be BIG. And if this were a movie it would be controlled by Mr. Big or perhaps his brother). Ah. Well. Maybe when the kids grow up they will become libertarians.
Cross Posted at Power and Control
Comments
4 responses to “Government Solution”
The state is always the enemy. When will people ever learn.
“There is no “government” solution to the government problem.”
I agree wholeheartedly with your point. In fact this leads me to become the anti-Biden; i.e., (legally) NOT paying taxes is a citizen’s patriotic duty. Let me explain.
Judge Learned Hand is quoted as saying that there is nothing illegal about a citizen arranging his affairs so as to pay the leas amount of tax. Since govt always expands to spend all the income it receives (and then some), it becomes the taxpayers’ duty to see that govt legally receives as little income as possible to limit the reaches and expansion of govt.
It is our patriotic duty to “starve the beast” and to keep as much capital as possible in the private sector.
They got the root cause 1/4 right. Sure the relationship between big business and government is unhealthy but they misunderstand who is in charge.
Big banks loaned to high-risk people because? Because they were hauled in front of Congress, called racist money grubbers, etc. As a compromise, Frannie and Freddie were ordered to guarantee more high-risk loans – and the banks sold the junk as soon as they wrote the loans.
None of this would have happened if government had left it alone and let businesses be greedy for the right reasons.
Bram,
You are quite right. The first reality is that those who work in the private sector are much brighter and much more skilled than those who work for the govt That’s precisely why they choose to work in the private sector in the first place; they can do better for themselves.
The second reality is that no matter what the govt dictates (e.g., the Community Reinvestment Act) those clever people in the private sector are going to say “Since we’re forced to do it anyway, we’re going to figure out some way to make money doing it.”
The third reality is that govt solutions always beget new problems. The housing meltdown was as much due to the mark-to-market rule as to the Community Reinvestment Act. The mark-to-market rule was invoked after the Enron melt-down to assure that companies could not get away with over-valuing their financial inventories. So, when the housing bubble burst, mark-to-market forced financial institutions to UNDER-value their financial inventories thus contributing to a financial death spiral.
As Simon wrote above, “There is no “government” solution to the government problem.”