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Robert Gates might become an administration critic according to Alana Goodman.
During an interview with Newsweek today, departing Defense Secretary Robert Gates questioned whether the Obama administration is willing or able to continue America’s leading role in the world, indicating that he may become a thorn in the side for President Obama’s 2012 bid.
“I’ve spent my entire adult life with the United States as a superpower, and one that had no compunction about spending what it took to sustain that position,” Gates told Newsweek. “It didn’t have to look over its shoulder because our economy was so strong. This is a different time.” …
While we’ve been enjoying the story of David Mamet’s conversion, Christopher Hitchens has been fuming. He’s one of our favorites so we’ll give him a look.
… I am writing this review in the same week as I am conducting a rather exhausting exchange with Noam Chomsky in the pages of a small magazine. I have no difficulty in understanding why it is that former liberals and radicals become exasperated with the pieties of the left. I have taught at Berkeley and the New School, and I know what Mamet is on about when he evokes the dull atmosphere of campus correctness. Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case. But then he writes: “The BP gulf oil leak . . . was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks was good. Why?” This is merely lame, fails to compare like with like, appears unintentionally to be unsure why the gulf leak was “bad” and attempts an irony where none exists.
Irony is one of the elements of tragedy, a subject with which Mamet is much occupied. He has read — perhaps before Glenn Beck’s promotion of it on the air — Friedrich von Hayek’s classic defense of the market, “The Road to Serfdom.” (I would guess he has not read Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”) Briefly, Hayek identified what he called “the Tragic View” of the free market: the necessity of making difficult choices between competing goods. Classical economics had already defined this as “opportunity cost,” which is just as accurate but less tear-jerking. We have long known it under other maxims — “to govern is to choose” — or even under folkloric proverbs about having cakes and consuming them. But to Mamet, Hayek is the brilliant corrective to the evil of Franklin Roosevelt, who “dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy,” and shares this dismal record with Nazis, Stalinists and other “Socialists.” More recent collapses and crimes in the private capital sector, and the Bush-Obama rescue that followed, strike him as large steps in the same direction. …
Fresh off his Spring hiatus, David Warren makes a point about laws as a product of morality, not the cause of it. He uses Anthony Weiner to make his point.
As a man with feminist credentials, he is probably against using social media to prey on women. Yet there is no law against it, so what is the problem?
Here, to my view, is the crux of the issue. To the “progressive” mindset, there is nothing wrong with anything until there is a law passed against it, for the law creates morality and ethics, and not vice versa. There is no “natural law,” no antecedent right and wrong, of which human law provides an imperfect expression. “Justice” is, like Brooklyn and Queens, something entirely man-made.
Compare, the incredible media trawl through the e-mail correspondence of Sarah Palin, when governor of Alaska – the purpose of which was to find any instance, in more than 100 kilos of paper printout, in which she had, even unknowingly, contravened some state or federal regulation, however minor. …
… “Legalism” is the word for this very political phenomenon.
Remember when Reagan campaigned for re-election with the slogan ”Morning In America?” Matthew Continetti says the GOP should run against Obama with “Mourning in America.”
Trying to stay upbeat? Avoid the business section. Unemployment stands at 9.1 percent. Growth is narcoleptic. The housing market hasn’t hit bottom. Fears of a Greek default are roiling markets. The deficit is running more than a trillion dollars for the third year in a row and won’t be shrinking anytime soon. A U.S. fiscal crisis may be only a few years (or months) away. President Obama, meanwhile, seems to think our problems would be solved if only we banned ATMs and built solar-powered bullet trains. His “propellerheads”—Geithner, Bernanke, Sperling, et al.—are spinning to the ground. Alert the authorities: Stop these men before they stimulate again.
The Republican presidential candidates have a powerful case to make against the Obama economy. A year ago, on June 17, 2010, the White House kicked off “Recovery Summer” by sending Joe Biden to home weatherization sites across the country. The headline for Timothy Geithner’s August 2, 2010, New York Times op-ed was “Welcome to the Recovery.” Geithner, it turns out, was about as honest with readers as he was with the IRS.
Normally, America goes into overdrive as it exits a recession. This time we’ve been limping along. Why? Because the president is more concerned with tax-and-spend politics than aligning incentives to promote innovation, productivity, efficiency, and debt reduction. Obama’s stimulus failed on its own terms, his health care plan hangs like a sword of Damocles over small business, and his regulatory agencies—from the EPA to the NLRB to the Federal Reserve to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—have become economic uncertainty machines. …
NY Post Op-Ed has more on the ATM gaffe.
… “There are some structural issues with our economy where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers,” President Obama told Ann Curry on the “Today” show Tuesday. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
Let’s quickly run through some of the major conceptual errors behind that statement: ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are not new, though persistently crushing levels of unemployment are. Moreover, the number of bank tellers actually has grown over recent decades.
And if we should fear machines for stealing jobs, a notion that economists such as Frédéric Bastiat, Joseph Schumpeter and Henry Hazlitt have been debunking for 200 years, Obama should step right up to the implications of his logic and announce his great bill: the De-Automation Full Employment Act.
Goodbye, electric dishwashers: Manual laborers could be doing your work. Goodbye washing machines, hello washerwomen. Think of the explosion in jobs for messengers that will follow when phones are outlawed. …
Michael Barone has a couple of posts on the gangster government.
If this article by professors at Harvard Law School and Indiana University Business School is correct (hat tip to Paul Caron’s taxprof blog and Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit), the Treasury acted contrary to law when it ruled that post-bankruptcy General Motors could utilize $45 billion in pre-bankruptcy net operating losses to reduce any corporate income taxes it may owe. The article is entitled “Can the Treasury Exempt Its Own Companies from Tax? The $45 Billion GM NOL Carryforward,” and the authors’ answer is No.
“Treasury solved this problem by issuing a series of “Notices” in which it announced that the law did not apply. On its terms, § 382 states that the NOL limits apply when a firm’s ownership changed. That rule, the Treasury declared, did not apply to itself. Notwithstanding the straightforward and all-inclusive statutory language, GM would be able to continue to use its NOLs in full after the Treasury sold its stock.
The Treasury had no legal or economic justification for these Notices, which applied to Citigroup and AIG as well as to GM. Nonetheless, the Notices largely escaped public attention, though they had the potential to transfer significant wealth to loyal supporters (the UAW). That it could do so illustrates the risk involved in this manipulation. We suggest that Congress give its members standing to challenge such manipulation in court.”
Exempting a company from taxes contrary to law in order to confer benefits on a political ally is an act of gangster government. …
Speaking of gangster government, OC Register and San Fran Chronicle have stories about paradise lost.
The pace of companies moving partly or completely out of California has accelerated in 2011, according to Irvine business relocation expert Joe Vranich.
Through June 16, 129 California companies have moved jobs, work and/or headquarters out of state, says Vranich who has been tracking what he calls “disinvestment events” for three years. That is 60 more since his last round-up April 15.
So far this year, the departures average 5.4 a week, compared to 3.9 a week in 2010 and one a week in 2009, Vranich says.
Separately, Register reporter Mary Ann Milbourn reports that out-of-state recruiters are starting to come after California workers too.
“Our losses are occurring at an accelerated rate,” Vranich says. “Also, no one knows the real level of activity because some companies are not required to file layoff notices with the state because of their small size.
“A conservative estimate is that only one out of five company departures becomes public knowledge,” he adds, “so that means California may suffer more than 1,000 disinvestment events this year.