By Thomas E. Brewton
Today's clamor for more regulation of financial institutions to prevent another subprime mortgage meltdown is an exercise in self- deception.
Congress, led by Representative Barney Frank, is planning to overhaul regulation of the financial community, and Treasury Secretary Paulson has already proposed a broad program for that purpose.
No doubt, much of what is proposed is needed. But it should be obvious from repeated experience over the decades that regulations alone will not prevent periodic economic booms and busts.
Only by dealing with the root cause will we moderate economic cycles. And that root cause is the ineluctable human tendency to over-expand bank credit when the money supply is artificially enlarged.
Today's proposed subprime mortgage regulations may prevent tomorrow's repetition of that phenomenon, but they will have no restraining impact upon whatever the next speculative bubble may be. Sarbanes- Oxley regulation was instituted after the dot.com bubble-burst and the corporate collapse of Enron, but it had no restraining effect upon the speculative housing bubble, of which subprime lending is merely a symptom, not a cause. Before that, we had the speculative explosion of commercial real estate over-building that ended with the collapse of the savings and loan institutions in the 1980s.
Beginning with our nation's first financial panic in 1819, similar boom-and-bust patterns appear every five to ten years, except in extraordinary circumstances such as wartime.
In one respect, Karl Marx's economic analysis was on the mark.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Economics categories at 10:16 PM EDT
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By Thomas E. Brewton
How indicative of his character and beliefs is Senator Obama's having launched one of his political campaigns at the home of his friends Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?
Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers?
Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?
The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:
"Life With the Weathermen: No Regrets for a Love of Explosives"
By Dinitia Smith
"I don't regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers said. "I feel we didn't do enough." Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Presidential Race, Terrorism categories at 10:13 PM EDT
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by Thomas E. Brewton
The inconsistency of atheistic materialism. There's more there than Marx allowed for.
Our thoroughly secularized society explains events and behavior, human nature itself, as the product of the material conditions of living and earning a living, in accord with the Marxian thesis.
In The German Ideology Marx and his colleague Friederick Engels wrote:
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
Present-day liberals therefore deny the concept of a higher law, of timeless moral truths emanating from God the Creator of the universe. They fancy themselves capable of restructuring society, and human nature in the process. Hence the endless stream of new Federal welfare-state programs. In the liberal view, economic and social problems can be cured only by bountiful application of the most materialistic of all things: money.
School massacres, of which Virginia Tech is the latest and deadliest example, predictably are thought by liberals to result from a material factor: the availability of firearms. In liberal theory, make guns unavailable, and you change human nature.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Education, Liberalism, Social Issues categories at 5:54 PM EDT
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by Sher Zieve
Not satisfied with calling US troops stupid, via his now infamous 2006 remarks, the European wannabee Sen. John Kerry has now blasted the entire United States of America. But, then he also did that in the 1970s. Speaking from one of the "world’s stages", this time in Davos, Switzerland, Kerry firmly placed his horsy hoof in his mouth—again—when he referred to the United States as "a sort of international pariah.." Note: John Kerry is one of the few US citizens who actually is a pariah.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Politics, Terrorism, US Military categories at 9:56 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberal social justice is based on statistical averages relating to an abstraction called "humanity." Individual morality is not an element in that liberal cosmology.
One of the first legislative acts of the newly ensconced Congressional liberals was increasing the minimum wage. Countless studies have demonstrated that the legal minimum wage is counter-productive. But it sounds good and it can be applied at one shot without the tedious process of arriving at fair wages in individual cases.
The minimum wage is an example of the sound-good, feel-good statistical virtues of liberal-socialist-progressivism. Another is Al Gore's championing the Kyoto Protocols that would eliminate millions of workers' jobs in the Western world to reduce greenhouse gases, a statistical virtue that state-planners hypothesize will prevent the current high-point cycle of sun spot activity from warming the earth.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Socialism categories at 10:56 PM EST
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by Thomas E. Brewton
Liberals see the natural world as flawed and presume hubristically to restructure nature to fit their artificial, intellectual blueprint for perfection. In contrast, religious Jews and Christians are instructed to take joy in God's marvelously created cosmos, to recognize that the world is complex far beyond the capacity of any human minds to comprehend its entirety.
Liberals look to Marxian economics. Religious Jews and Christians seek God's guidance.
Liberal Republicans and Democrats, along with the media that follow the lead of the New York Times, are ceaselessly intent upon criticizing everything about life in the United States. This is true not just during political campaign season, but unendingly so.
Perfection, from liberals' viewpoint, would be a theoretical world-society with equal distribution of income in a socialistically regulated economy, under a one-world government led by socialist intellectuals in the UN.
If a liberal sees anything that differs from his idea of perfection, his knee-jerk reaction is to demand a new law to regulate or correct it. The implicit assumption is that everything in society is the product of materialistic forces emanating from the political state. Hence the harping, for example, on income gaps, and the presumption that the Federal government can, and should, run the economy to eliminate income discrepancies.
David Limbaugh's new book "Bankrupt" (see Brent Bozell's review in the Washington Times) documents this fundamental posture of negativism.
Seeing the world as all wrong, while confidently believing that you can fix everything if you are put in charge, is a basic characteristic of the gnostic doctrine of liberal-socialism.
As I wrote in The Da Vinci Code: Liberal Gnosticism:
Gnosticism is the belief that intellectual elites have secret knowledge about the structure of human society and about the relationship between humans and the cosmos. These elites are thereby empowered to direct human affairs.
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Posted by Walt in Communism, Liberalism, Politics, Socialism categories at 8:21 AM EDT
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First posted on Aug 14, 2006 in The View from 1776
by Thomas E. Brewton
The View from 1776
British MI-5’s success in thwarting the plot to blow up a large number of transatlantic airliners reminds us that hamstringing our own intelligence forces by the ACLU and its sympathizers has a long history.
The op-ed page of today’s Wall Street Journal carries an article by David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey. The authors describe the important differences between British and American legal doctrine that enabled British intelligence forces to work more effectively than can our own intelligence and law-enforcement community. Great Britain is the home of personal liberty and limitations on arbitrary government power, but the British, in the area of surveillance and apprehension of terrorists, have been considerably more realistic than have we.
There is a long pedigree for the liberal mindset that leads to assiduously blocking effective methods of surveillance and detention of enemies of the United States, the same mindset that produced repeated, putatively criminal revelations of top-secret national security programs by the New York Times.
It goes all the way back to the late 1800s, when socialist and anarchist agitators began to make their presence felt in the United States. On Manhattan’s Lower East Side and in Union Square, with Greenwich Village intellectuals’ propaganda support after World War I, anarchists and socialists staged protest rallies that blocked traffic and interfered with ordinary business. Police often had to stop violence, which usually involved mass arrests of demonstrators.
Those socialist and anarchist activists, in effect, demanded that the First Amendment’s freedom of speech be interpreted as a suicide pact that would allow them to carry out their openly avowed aim to destroy formal government under the Constitution (in the anarchists’ case), or to replace the Constitution with a collectivized socialist system that would seize private property and redistribute it to the masses.
Socialist and anarchist leaders were involved in, and openly advocated, assassination of political and business leaders. Emma Goldman, the most widely-heard oratorical voice of anarcho-socialism, was the leftist version of Timothy McVeigh, the radical right-winger who in 1995 bombed a Federal office building in Oklahoma City killing 166 people.
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Posted by Walt in ACLU, Communism, Freedom of Speech, Socialism, Terrorism categories at 1:44 AM EDT
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