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Steve Hayward at Power Line with a great post on politicians who see the light. He tells the story of David Bonior, former Dem congressman who started a business and suddenly had an understanding of the effects of regulations. Immediately I thought of George McGovern’s similar experiences as the 1972 Dem candidate for president also went into business. I was going to go looking for the letter he sent to the Journal, but Hayward found that too. First we’ll have Hayward.

I know, being on the Left means you’re a slow learner by definition, but still, the story reported the other day that former leftist Congressman David Bonior (D-Michigan) has become an entrepreneur and discovered, lo and behold!— regulations are slow and costly!  From the Washington Post earlier this week:

Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.

“It took us a ridiculous amount of time to get our permits. I understand regulations and . . . the necessity for it. But we lost six months of business because of that. It’s very frustrating.” (Emphasis added.) …

Here’s the Bonior article from WaPo.

David Bonior is a hungry entrepreneur bent on making money.

David Bonior ?

The former Michigan Democratic congressman, liberal pit bull, academic, antiwar firebrand and labor-union BFF has undergone an epiphany, making him simpatico with businesses and the profit motive.

He has invested at least $1 million, by my estimate, building two family-owned Washington restaurants, the second of which, Agua 301, is near Nationals Park and only a line drive from the Anacostia River. His first eatery, Zest Bistro, opened on Capitol Hill four years ago.

“It’s the American Dream,” he said of his new career.

Over tasty Caesar salad and tacos at Agua 301, the mild-mannered, thoughtful Bonior — chastened by local regulators and fickle weather — sounds more born-again capitalist than fire-breathing lefty.

“Small-business people work very hard,” said the 68-year-old, who has spent most of his life in government. “If you are a small-business guy, you are out there and not as protected as a government employee. They struggle every day. A snow day, a government worker is off. A restaurant person takes a hit from that snow day. This winter was very, very tough on the [restaurant] industry.” …

A contributor to the Detroit News reacts. 

About the only way to get a die-hard liberal politician to understand how the economy of business really works is to require them to run an actual business. Case in point: Former Congressman David Bonior. As reported in the Washington Post, Bonior has taken the plunge and become a business owner. Among the more ironic of his observations is this gem: “Bonior said if he had the power, he would lighten up on pesky regulations.”

For almost three decades, Congressman Bonior did have the power. He used it to increase the regulatory burden on business – especially small business. How delightful that he finally figured out what we, small business-people, were trying to tell him during those years was true. Not that it does us a whole lot of good now. …

Here’s George McGovern.

… My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.

For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.

Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.

Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening. …

Thomas Sowell with a three part series on the costs of liberalism. Here he writes on the effects of regs that limit growth.

… One couple who had lived in their 1,200 square foot home in Palo Alto for 20 years decided to sell it, and posted an asking price just under $1.3 million.

Competition for that house forced the selling price up to $1.7 million.

Another Palo Alto house, this one with 1,292 square feet of space, is on the market for $2,285,000. It was built in 1895.

Even a vacant lot in Palo Alto costs more than a spacious middle-class home costs in most of the rest of the country.

How does this tie in with liberalism?

In this part of California, liberalism reigns supreme and “open space” is virtually a religion. What that lovely phrase means is that there are vast amounts of empty land where the law forbids anybody from building anything.

Anyone who has taken Economics 1 knows that preventing the supply from rising to meet the demand means that prices are going to rise. Housing is no exception.

Yet when my wife wrote in a local Palo Alto newspaper, many years ago, that preventing the building of housing would cause existing housing to become far too expensive for most people to afford it, she was deluged with more outraged letters than I get from readers of a nationally syndicated column.

What she said was treated as blasphemy against the religion of “open space” — and open space is just one of the wonderful things about the world envisioned by liberals that is ruinously expensive in the mundane world where the rest of us live.

Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions. …

Next, Sowell writes on liberals and disarmament.

Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally.

Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful — and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful.

We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine. When Ukraine became an independent nation, it gave up all the nuclear missiles that were on its territory from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

At that time, Ukraine had the third largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Do you think Putin would have attacked Ukraine if it still had those nuclear weapons? Or do you think it is just a coincidence that nations with nuclear weapons don’t get invaded?

Among those who urged Ukraine to reduce even its conventional, non-nuclear weapons as well, was a new United States Senator named Barack Obama. He was all for disarmament then, and apparently even now as President of the United States. He has refused Ukraine’s request for weapons with which to defend itself.

As with so many things that liberals do, the disarmament crusade is judged by its good intentions, not by its actual consequences. …

Mr. Sowell closes with the liberal inequality dreck.

… If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals.

Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama’s leftist policies.

This is not as surprising as some might think. When you make it unnecessary for many people to work, fewer people work. Unprecedented numbers of Americans are on the food stamp program. Unprecedented numbers are also living off government “disability” payments.

There is a sweeping array of other government subsidies, whether in money or in kind, which together allow many people to receive greater benefits than they could earn by working at low-skilled jobs. Is it surprising that the labor force participation rate is lower than it has been in decades?

In short, when people don’t have to earn incomes, they are less likely to earn incomes — or, at least, to earn incomes in legal and visible ways that could threaten their government benefits.

Most of the households in the bottom 20 percent of income earners have nobody working. There are more heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent than in the bottom 20 percent.

What this means statistically is that liberals can throw around numbers on how many people are living in “poverty” — defined in terms of income received, not in terms of goods and services provided by the government. …

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A foreign policy overview from Major Garrett. He calls it our “Punch and Judy” policy.

MANILA — For President Obama, caution in the defense of liberty is no vice, and militarism in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Obama didn’t come to Asia to paraphrase Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention. But he did after growing frustrated with recent editorial criticism portraying his foreign policy as weak and naive. …

… Obama, in other words, knows precisely what he doesn’t want to do. No errors. No big, embarrassing strikeouts. Singles and doubles. In baseball, that’s called a Punch and Judy, station-to-station offense. Move the runners along gradually; keep momentum going.

But if your global rivals know you best by your self-imposed limits, how capably can you project power? Is it canny to concede more than necessary? This is the central question for Obama’s foreign policy. He argued forcefully here that the greater danger is picking reckless fights or pretending a war-exhausted American public will support war in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere in Asia.

The problem for Obama is the perception here and elsewhere that the most forceful thing he’s done on this trip or since Benghazi has been to explain what he can’t do—not what he can.

John Kerry is just one of the fools picked for the foreign policy team. Gerald Seib reports on an interview that shows how the SecState gets Russia policy exactly wrong. Kerry thinks present policy is uniquely Putin, when in fact it is exactly what Russians want and exactly what Russia has always done whether Czars, Communists, or the new Putintate.

Secretary of State John Kerry has been thinking about, talking through and wrestling with the Ukraine crisis for weeks, but he still grasps for words to describe the motivations of the man at its center: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“You almost feel that he’s creating his own reality, and his own sort of world, divorced from a lot of what’s real on the ground for all those people, including people in his own country,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview late Monday. …

… while sanctions may be pinching Kremlin cronies, the conversation with Mr. Kerry leaves no doubt that he sees Russia’s actions as the product not of any collective Russian view of the world, but of the determination of an individual: Vladimir Putin.

The Ukraine crisis, Mr. Kerry said, is “obviously very personally driven in ways that I think are uniquely inappropriate to 21st century leadership.” He added: “It’s an amazing display of a kind of personal reaction to something that just doesn’t fit into the lessons learned for the last 60 years or 70 years. It’s so divorced that it leaves you feeling badly for the consequences. I think the Russian people are going to pay a price for this. It’s unfortunate for the Russian people, who clearly don’t fit into the costs that are being attached to this, because it appears to be so personal to President Putin.”

Mr. Kerry said he finds the Russian leader’s appeals to nationalism in particular “dangerous in this time and place.” …

Here’s something written by Pickerhead in March 11th’s Pickings. It explains how Kerry gets fooled when he thinks the Russians he hears represent the rest of the country.

… We get fooled by a very thin veneer of Russians who have a Western point of view. And more confusion comes from their excellence in Western idioms of music and literature. This leads us to believe they are just like us. They are not. Scratch below the surface and you will find a xenophobic peasant; notable only for a capacity for suffering we cannot even imagine. Smart though. Because everyone of them can speak Russian like a native.

This xenophobia, the fear of the foreign, is something Russians come by honestly and we would too if geography had dealt us their poor hand. It is a huge flat country with no natural barriers to entry, or invasion, for a thousand miles. Don’t think of the Urals, they are like the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The Volga provides an example of Russia’s flat geography. It rises in the Valdai Hills near Moscow and wanders for almost 2,400 miles before arriving at the Caspian Sea. A drop of less than 750 feet, or three and a half inches every mile. As a consequence, the country was constantly tested from every direction and Russians came to value a strong government that would protect them.

Our political ancestors were on an island and learned to fear tyranny from inside the country. That’s why we got the Magna Carta, and a government constrained by a constitution and the rule of law. Those things did not happen because we were wrapped in virtue at birth. Our peoples solved a different set of problems. …

To put a coda on this section, we learn from Breitbart News Russians are the happiest they have been in 25 years. And why not? Regardless of what Kerry thinks, they have exactly the government they want.

Even though their country is preparing for military conflict and its economy is in recession, Russians, a survey released Thursday said, are the happiest they have been in 25 years.

In its annual “Happiness Index,” the VTsIOM public opinion research center said 78 percent of Russians declared themselves content with their lives, a one percent increase over last year’s statistics. Those in the 18 to 25 age group were the happiest, with 92 percent of respondents saying they were happy.

One in three respondents noted happiness, for them, was linked to family life, their children and grandchildren, and an interesting work life. The number of those simply thankful to be alive has doubled, the survey said.

Those unhappy complained of bad health and a low standard of living.

The survey was conducted among 1,600 respondents across 45 Russian regions.

Of course, it is not only Kerry. The president has found kindred fools for more of his foreign policy apparatus. American Thinker has a long post about the Tommy Vietor interview with Bret Baier last week. It is a long post, but here’s some bio material on others.  

Now, on to the real news: the grave affairs of state in the Obama administration are in the hands of incompetent, inexperienced people who are not up to the responsibilities they wield. If you are wondering how someone so callow came to such a position, read this and weep. He started as a van driver. Jonathan Karl, Richard Coolidge, and Jordyn Phelps wrote over a year ago:

“Tommy Vietor started working for Barack Obama when he was still Senator Obama–well before he became a presidential candidate–and until Friday, the 32-year-old Vietor hadn’t stopped. His first job for Obama was as the driver of a press van, and he rose up the ranks through the 2008 campaign, and then the White House press office, to become the National Security Council spokesman.”

Now leaving the White House to open a political communications firm with the president’s departing speechwriter Jon Favreau, Vietor says it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for the president. …

… In 2010, Ed Lasky examined the appalling lack of qualifications of Ben Rhodes, now at the center of the storm:

Who is Ben Rhodes and what qualifies him to be the Deputy National SecurityAdviser?

He was Barack Obama’s speechwriter (albeit, on foreign policy topics) during the campaign. He also played a role in the Cairo speech that presented a highly fictionalized history of both Islam (praised it for accomplishments that were not Islam’s) and Israel (a legacy of the Holocaust guilt).

Maybe he has a certain talent for fiction. After all, it was only  a few years ago that “he was an aspiring fiction writer working on a novel called “The Oasis of Love” about a megachurch in Houston, a dog track and a failed romance.

Rhodes has enjoyed a rapid rise — because why?

Granted he is quite the wordsmith. That must qualify him for one of the top jobs involving our national security. It must have been a symbiotic relationship — a talented speechwriter with a talented speech reader. …

… Then there is Valerie Jarrett, who appears to be running the country while Obama plays golf, shoots hoops, parties, and has “downtime,” as Michelle Obama recently called it, with his family, watching TV.

Even among foreign policy appointees with actual credentials, such as UN Ambassador Samantha Power who has a PhD, it is all theory and no actual experience and an inability to follow through on all the fine words she has written.

As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit so often sarcastically remarks, “The country is in the best of hands.”

 Craig Pirrong with a welcome post on Warren Buffett.

… The recent spate of accidents has led Warren Buffett to call for stronger regulation, most notably, a requirement for safer rail cars.  Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway of course owns the nation’s second largest rail carrier, BNSF.

That Warren, always looking out for the public interest, and willing to sacrifice the interests of one of his major holdings to benefit us hoi polloi.

Not.

First, it’s long been known that some firms in an industry can benefit from the imposition of more stringent safety regulations. Yes, these regulations raise everybody’s costs, but some firms’ costs rise more than others. The less-impacted firms have an incentive to press for the regulations in order to raise their rivals’ costs. This raises market price. The effect on price more than offsets the effect on cost for the less cost-impacted firms.

Which means: always look askance at people like Buffett who are calling for regulation of their industry.

And this goes double for Buffett. For in addition to BNSF, Berkshire Hathaway owns the Union Tank Car Company, one of the largest manufacturers of oil tanker railcars. Meaning that some of the costs from requiring the purchase of more robust railcars goes from Buffett’s BNSF pocket into his UTLX pocket. He is, effectively, hedged against the rise in BNSF’s costs that would result from regulations requiring the use of safer cars. What’s more, his UTLX also pockets some of the costs incurred by his rivals. That’s a double win for Buffett. His rivals’ costs go up, raising prices for rail freight which benefits BNSF, and Buffett also books as profit (at UTLX) some of the higher costs his rivals incur.

Great work if you can get it.

So yeah, Buffett’s call for more stringent regulation of oil carrying railcars is totally altruistic. Totally.

It never ceases to amaze me how Buffett’s kindly grandfather shtick fools the world. He is utterly cynical in his actions and public statements. He demonizes derivatives, but engages in some huge exotic options trades. He claims he supports the estate tax out of interest of fairness and equity, not mentioning that his insurance businesses profit immensely from the estate tax (and that he can of course largely circumvent the tax). He has manipulated the silver market. And he poses as a defender of public safety, not mentioning his very strong economic interests in such regulation. …