Let's play Bad News, Good News!
The bad news:
As though tracking every citizen via Real ID weren't enough, our government is turning its sights, via the USDA, on pushing for required RFID tagging of all livestock, whether it be a single chicken or a herd of cattle. If enacted, this will decimate the capability of individuals and small businesses to raise animals for food, leaving ( Read more... )
As though tracking every citizen via Real ID weren't enough, our government is turning its sights, via the USDA, on pushing for required RFID tagging of all livestock, whether it be a single chicken or a herd of cattle. If enacted, this will decimate the capability of individuals and small businesses to raise animals for food, leaving ( Read more... )
Feeding Frenzy
Stimulating Times for Lobbyists
February 20, 2009
The feeding frenzy has started.
I was on an airplane the other day heading to the funeral of a very dear friend. Next to me was seated a man in a business suit who, I noticed, was poring over a statute printed off the Internet related to lobbying. He was, I soon realized, a local government official heading off to Washington to lobby for a piece of the pie-money from the economic stimulus bill, now known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
As he told me, “Everybody’s going to Washington.”
And with good reason. Congress has served up a buffet of $800 billion in what I can only call one of the biggest grab-bag boondoggles in American history. And the people who stand to benefit most, as Robert Frank pointed out on his blog at the Wall Street Journal, are lobbyists. “When there are big contracts,” he wrote, “there are lobbyists. K-Street is back in business!”
I can only think back to my own days as an attorney, when my firm represented companies doing business with the government. If I were still in the business, as they say, I’d be making millions.
For years on BreakPoint, I have railed against earmarking-that is, when congressmen slip expenditures into the budgeting process without debate. Now, as the Washington Times has pointed out, President Obama claimed that “the stimulus plan contains no earmarks because Congress technically did not use the earmark process for lawmakers to request and drop in specific spending items.”
Well, forget about the technicalities, there is enough pork in this stimulus package to feed the world for years. Will someone please tell me how millions of dollars to protect the habitat of a marsh mouse in San Francisco, or millions for the National Endowment for the Arts, or billions for the ACORN neighborhood organizing groups is going to stimulate the economy?
But this is what happens when legislators are in the hip pockets of lobbyists and special interests.
I applauded President Obama for his new ethics rules prohibiting lobbyists from serving in his administration. And he was right to promise transparency in government.
Sadly, however, the President has granted numerous waivers so that certain lobbyists could join his administration. And as for transparency, Mr. Obama pledged to “end the practice of writing legislation behind close doors,” and to “expose special interest tax breaks to public scrutiny,” and to allow the public five days to review non-emergency legislation before he signs it.
What happened with the stimulus bill? The bill was written almost entirely behind closed doors. The Washington Post reported that special tax breaks were given at the last minute to, for example, Detroit automakers and to buyers of RVs and motorcycles. And of course, not only did the public not have five days to review the bill, neither did legislators!
I have said for years on BreakPoint that the biblical role of government is to preserve order and do justice. It is not to dole out favors or to make lobbyists rich. Yet that is what is happening today to an unprecedented degree, even by Washington standards.
And both parties are responsible. When the Republicans controlled the Congress, they failed to fix it, and now the Democrats are perpetuating it as well.
So I say demand that our leaders clean up their act. Public outrage may be the only thing left between us and the loss of our form of government.
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by Richard Ebeling
On Monday, February 23rd, President Obama will be hosting a "fiscal responsibility summit" with the publicly declared purpose of reining in the growing cost of government, especially the projected unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare in the years and decades to come.
However, as I explain in a new piece I've written on "Obama and Fiscal Irresponsibility," undoubtedly there will be the usual smoke and mirrors that leave the fundamental issues untouched: Should government be in the retirement and health care business? How, instead, do we return to a free society in which individuals are responsible for planning for their own retirement years and managing their own medical expenses in a truly free market economy?
None of this will be on Obama's agenda at this summit meeting, because as the president emphasized in his inaugural address on January 20th, he doesn't want to discuss whether government is "too big" or "too small." He has already made up his mind: government is responsible for providing jobs, health care, and pensions for all Americans. He only wants to sort out how to do that more comprehensively in the future and figure out where the money will come from to fund this governmental largess.
The only way this financial straightjacket will ever be lifted from the shoulders of the American citizen/taxpayers will be through a rejection of the premises and policies of the interventionist/welfare state.
A starting point for this revolution in ideology and ideas will be the repudiation of the "entitlement" mentality and its presumption that government is to be considered a giant redistributive transfer machine to rob Peter to pay Paul.
Along with this must be the disavowal of this dangerous notion of a "social contract" that that says that since the government has promised these redistributive benefits to multitudes of people there is no turning back. "Why, we can't have the government 'break its promise,' can we?"
This "promise" is based upon the coercive legalized plunder that Frederic Bastiat so eloquently explained and warned against in the middle of the 19th century. A "promise" that relies upon a thief continuing to rob some to "give" to others, is immoral and dangerous to the character and functioning of any type of healthy and free society.
Ludwig von Mises also discussed this, in 1930, in an address that he gave before the Vienna Industrial Club:
"Whenever there is any talk about decreasing public expenditures, the advocates of this spending policy voice their objection, saying that most of the existing expenditures, as well as the increases in expenditures, are inevitable. Any notion of applying the concept of austerity to the machinery of the public sector is to be rejected. What exactly does 'inevitable' mean in this context? That the expenditures are based on various laws that have been passed in the past is not an objection if the argument for eliminating these laws is based on their damaging effects on the economy. The metaphorical use of the term 'inevitable' is nothing but a haven in which to hide in the face of an inability to comprehend the seriousness of our situation. People do not want to accept the fact that the public budget has to be radically reduced."
Putting our heads in the sand will not make these fiscal burdens and their harmful effects on freedom and prosperity go away in contemporary America, and more than was the case in the Austria of the interwar period to which Mises was referring in this address.
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