Sunday, October 27, 2013

ONE MORE TIME: George Will on "Reckless Endangerment".  Everyone, without exception, should read this book by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner.  It is a case study on why the government's role in the economy, in our lives, should be kept to an absolute minimum.  It is an apolitical book that sets the record straight on why the financial meltdown occurred and who was to blame.  Since all the perpetrators of this shame (Frank, Dodd, et. al.) are always rewriting history it's helpful to have the facts available to refute their efforts to blame everyone but themselves.i

CREEPING STATISM:  This brief description of a clause in the Dodd-Frank bill that has the effect on further nationalizing the financial industry by decree, is one more example of how we lose our freedom to the state, decree by decree, regulation by regulation.

Today a number of Obama administration agencies with financial-sector regulatory responsibilities have jointly published in the Federal Register a proposed “Policy Statement Establishing Joint Standards for Assessing the Diversity Policies and Practices of Entities Regulated by the Agencies.”  The statement comes as a result of Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank legislation, which requires these agencies each to “establish an Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” that, in turn, is to develop diversity and inclusion standards for workplaces and contracting.
The proposed statement is even worse than the bill itself, since it aggressively applies not only to the agencies themselves but also to all those regulated by it, and repeatedly insists on the use of “metrics” and “percentage[s]“ (i.e., numerical quotas) to ensure compliance. And while the statute at least cautions that diversity efforts are to be undertaken “in a manner consistent with the applicable law” (like the Constitution and, presumably, federal civil-rights statutes that are colorblind in their protection against discrimination), there is no such nod in the proposed statement, nor is there any mention of stopping or preventing discrimination – the only possible justification for consideration of race, ethnicity, and sex in hiring, promotion, and contracting.
This provision of the statute was championed most prominently by Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) and has been criticized by the Wall Street Journal, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Hans Bader, and myself, among others (I also wrote a short summary of Section 342 here, and Christopher Byrnes wrote a much more comprehensive analysis of the statute, here). Comments on the proposed statement are due by Christmas Eve.

LIES AND DAMN LIES; Joe Wilson was absolutely right. It is almost impossible to catalogue all the lies perpetrated by this administration, but here are a few.  These lies, and all the others, will come as a shock to all those millions of Americans who get their news from MSM, since they bury them or never report them in the first place, or what's even worse, don't really care.

CRONY CAPITALISM:  This is what you get with big government and corrupt politicians.  Add to this example all the other ones involving green energy  and the like and you have the formula for why we don't have "capitalism" in this country.  What we do have is a lot closer to fascism or national socialism as practiced by the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s.