The Agony and the Arrogance

Our government doesn't know what it's doing, but it keeps doing it anyway...

Here’s a bit of wisdom from that infamous economy wrecker, Senator Chris Dodd (D-Wall Street), upon passage of the Banking “Reform” Bill:

"It will take the next economic crisis, as certainly it will come, to determine whether or not the provisions of this bill will actually provide this generation or the next generation of regulators with the tools necessary to minimize the effects of that crisis." (Fox News)

Reminds me of Pelosi saying we’d have to pass health care so we can see what’s in it.  So they create hundreds of thousands of pages of red tape and tens of thousand of new bureaucratic overlords, and they don’t even know if it will work or not.   It wouldn’t be so bad if they were they were funding this progressive alchemy with their own money, on their own progressive commune out of sight of decent society...

Question: If this fixes “Too Big To Fail,” why does the bill include a huge fund for bailing out or dismantling banks that become too big to fail?


A Surplus of Government Arrogance, A Deficit of Humility
Amity Shlaes, as usual, provides a searchlight of reason that cuts through the progressive fog:

Good policy is what might be calledhumble policy. It starts with admitting what we don’t know. Thatincludes who will lead growth in 2011 or 2012, where that personlives, and how he or she will get capital. 

Humble policy thengoes on to concentrate on trying to let our economy become thatbroad space that future businesses and industries still unknown,might find inviting. 

Her steps to humility start with cutting taxes and regulation, "including the new health-care mandate."  This puts money in the hands of employers and removes uncertainty that this bureaucratic behemoth has created.  It puts more money and personal decision-making back where it belongs:  to the individual.

The next humble step would be to set policy to benefit theoverall economy, not any specific group.

The third humble policy is demanding a serious commitmentfrom lawmakers to abandon fiscal stimulus.

The fourth humble move is up to voters. It is to reduceexpectations about entitlements. 

Progressives lack the humility to acknowledge what Thomas Sowell has learned through a lifetime of study.  Each human being has a fundamental right to order his or her own life:

Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their 'betters.'" -- Dr. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions

A free and orderly marketplace arrives at better decisions than any government program ever has.

"Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace.

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history." -- Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed, p. 112

For more on the topic of Government Hubris, I highly recommend George Will’s excellent column, The High Price of American Hubris