Tag Archives: Big Government

Commentary

John Hawkins of Right Wing News interviews Tom Sowell

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Thomas Sowell

Right Wing News has a great interview with my favorite economist, Tom Sowell.

Excerpt:

Paul Krugman is one of the best known and highest regarded economists on the Left. He says the problem we have right now is the government simply is not spending enough money and the fears we have about the debt causing all these major problems are extremely overblown. What do you say to that argument that is very prevalent on the Left?

Well, it’s a heads I win, tails you lose argument because if we spend twice as much for the next ten years and things don’t get any better – you can still say, “We didn’t spend enough.” We should have spent four times as much. And if we spend four times as much, you can say we should spend 10 times as much. It’s an impossible argument to refute.

It just so happens I’ve been reading a statement by Henry Morganfeld, the Secretary of Treasury under FDR, and he made the statement in 1939 — he said, “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Now this is FDR’s closest confidant, the man who has been in charge of the spending — and after six years of it at this point, they have nothing to show for it and in point of fact, unemployment had gotten back up above 20 percent about a month before he made the statement.

Look at this – the man is branching out from fiscal conservatism into social conservatism. He’s not a Christian, so this is pretty awesome.

Excerpt:

Now, you talked a lot about cultural issues in the book. That’s something you’ve gotten more into in your columns lately. In the book you wrote about gay marriage and the comparison between gay marriage and interracial marriage. Why do you think that’s a bad comparison and what do you say to the argument that gay Americans have a right, perhaps even a constitutional right to get married?

Well, my Constitution must be out of date because I haven’t seen it there. It’s one of many things, such as the separation of church and state, that I’ve never seen there.

Marriage is not a right. Marriage is an imposition of a government’s interest in certain unions. Probably because those unions produce children, but for other reasons, too. Otherwise people could marry or not marry utterly independently of the government.

But what we’re talking about is not gay marriage. We’re talking about redefining marriage through the convenience of leaders who speak for the gays. And I don’t see any more reason for doing that than for allowing bigamists to redefine marriage to suit their convenience.

And you can read Tom Sowell’s latest column on FDR and the Great Depression here. He talks about how the policies of President Roosevely failed to lower unemployment and how they mirror the policies of Obama and the Democrats today.

Commentary

What can we learn from Europe about big government?

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From Ace of Spades. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

We see our future playing out in England and France right now. Only our upheavals are going to be much larger and more violent than theirs. Our population is larger, more diverse, and more polarized; our politics more fraught; our debts and obligations massively larger. Our passions are harder to rouse, but once aflame, take a long time to burn out.

As in France, we have let an enormous segment of our population — perhaps as much as half — fall into a state where they depend on government largesse for a substantial part of their income. This is not money they earned themselves, not wages or savings, but rather money squeezed from the more productive half of the country. Half of our citizens pay no income taxes at all. An increasing number will draw public-sector pensions, Social Security, and medical insurance (Medicare/Medicaid) in amounts that far exceed what they contributed to those plans. Half of the US population, in short, lives not by the fruits of their own toil but by the (coerced) charity of others, as filtered and distilled through the hand of the government. This can not — it can not, by the laws of economics and simple physics — continue. The mathematics of the problem trump even philosophical issues of fairness, of governance, of ethics or law. The mathematics simply will not allow it.

Consider the French. They are rioting over a proposal to raise the national age of retirement from 60 to 62. Germany’s is 65 (going to 67) — how happy will German workers be to subsidize the early retirements of their French neighbors? The French labor unions are on a rampage, denouncing the move as a violation of a “promise” the country made to the workers. (If this reminds you of California, New Jersey, New York, and Michigan — well, the situations are closely analogous.) The word “promise” is illuminating: people have stopped thinking of social welfare as a “benefit” or a “perquisite”, and have begun instead to think of it as a “right” or a “promise”. A legally-binding promise which cannot be broken, though the heavens fall. Well, the heavens are falling, and the sovereigns will discover a universal truth: a government “promise” is not a suicide pact. Reality will assert itself, one way or another.

Governments the world over are discovering that the river of money is not endless. That seemingly-inexhaustable mountain of wealth has been turned into an ocean of debt that will take decades to pay off. The spendthrift habits of the Western nations will put burdens on our children, and other generations not yet born, that should outrage us as a people. We are investing in the old rather than the young, and are punishing risk-taking and entrepreneurship rather than rewarding it. Our tax regimes seem to be deliberately crafted to kill innovation and long-term thinking. (What does “legacy” mean if the wealth I have accumulated in my life cannot be passed on to my children or heirs, but is instead eaten by the all-consuming government?) Young people — young families — are the foundation upon which Western Civilization is built. Neglect them, overburden them, cheat them, and you are committing societal suicide.

This is what the House Republicans have to stop Obama from doing. This is what is at stake.

News

Can government spend tax money more efficiently than you can?

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Here’s a scary article from The American Spectator. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The Social Security Administration sent out $250 checks — $18 million in all — to 72,000 dead people.

Alan Hevesi, former Controller for New York State, who was the sole trustee for the state’s large public pension fund, pled guilty to a charge of receiving $1 million in gifts and contributions from a money manager for steering $250 million of investments his way.

California, all but bankrupt, reported that last year it spent $467 million in taxpayer funds on scholarships to students at four-year colleges who failed to return for a second year.

The U.S. Postal Service, losing millions of dollars a month, has been giving cushy, non-bid contracts to former USPS executives. The USPS Inspector General found 17 of these contracts were given to former postal executives within a year of their retirement. One person received a no-bid $260,000 “knowledge transfer” contract. The IG reported, “These contracts were put in place even though highly experienced postal executives filled the positions vacated by the former executives.”

[…]Seventy-three people, led by a man who lived in the former Soviet Union, were rounded up for defrauding Medicare of $35 million-plus through phony clinics and stolen doctor and patient identities. This coast-to-coast crime ring gave their invented clinics P.O. box addresses and filed fake claims. Medicare fell for it.

[…]Thousands of Medicaid recipients in California were given debit cards with which to buy food. Instead, more than a few of them hied themselves to Las Vegas and ran up gambling losses on the debit cards. This brings to mind the periodic revelations in Washington that credit cards issued by federal government agencies have been used for – surprise — vacations, jewelry, expensive dinners, etc.

This is why conservatives value limited government. We taxpayers are paying these bureaucrats to waste our money. The private sector is a lot less corrupt and inefficient – the money needs to stay there.