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WSJ Op-Ed builds on the Woodward book to point to the generals who led us astray in Iraq.
… According to Mr. Woodward’s account, the uniformed military not only opposed the surge, insisting that their advice be followed; it then subsequently worked to undermine the president once he decided on another strategy.
In one respect, the actions taken by military opponents of the surge, e.g. “foot-dragging,” “slow-rolling” and selective leaking are, unfortunately, all-too-characteristic of U.S. civil-military relations during the last decade and a half. But the picture Mr. Woodward draws is far more troubling. Even after the policy had been laid down, the bulk of the senior U.S. military leadership — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, the rest of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Abizaid’s successor, Adm. William Fallon, actively worked against the implementation of the president’s policy.
If Mr. Woodward’s account is true, it means that not since Gen. McClellan attempted to sabotage Lincoln’s war policy in 1862 has the leadership of the U.S. military so blatantly attempted to undermine a president in the pursuit of his constitutional authority. It should be obvious that such active opposition to a president’s policy poses a threat to the health of the civil-military balance in a republic.
John Stossel wants to know what happened to market discipline.
Barack Obama says, “[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of … an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary” .
What? Does that mean that until last week the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush.
The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn’t have qualified for mortgages in a real private market.
Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable.
Now that it’s all tumbling down, the politicians and pundits blame the free market.
It’s not simply misunderstanding. It’s demagoguery by people who will never admit that their “progressive” social policies have spawned a taxpayer bill that boggles the mind.
This is a story not of private enterprise but of cynical political opportunism. Moral hazard — the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses — is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The bailout of those companies holding bad mortgages — big-business socialism — sets us up for the next crisis.
David Warren has similar thoughts.
… Any reader who has followed me for some time will guess that I am appalled by the (purported) $700 billion bailout that U.S. President George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have organized, yet cannot reasonably oppose it at a moment when the markets are close to a true meltdown. I am further appalled by the spectacle of the Democrats in the U.S. Congress, exploiting the emergency to affix massive quantities of poorly disguised pork to the blunderbuss bill.
And finally, appalled by the media and chattering heads calling the whole mess a “crisis of capitalism” when the plain facts show the opposite. The whole “subprime mortgage” instrument was invented by bankers specifically to assuage heavy-handed Congressional demands to swell the number of minority and low-income homeowners, 20 years ago. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were already bloated quasi-government bureaucracies, dangerously freed from many conventional market disciplines. And among the chief beneficiaries of the current bailout are the most extravagant contributors to the Democrat Party.
As one of my more knowing correspondents put it: “Wall Street loves money but hates free markets, because free markets distribute economic benefits to those who earn them, rather than to those best able to seize them.”
The capitalist investment bankers stand accused, rightly, of having invented brilliant kiting schemes — ultimately to deliver credit to customers who hadn’t earned it. Their “greed” is irrelevant — everyone is trying to make money. The point is that the schemes themselves were basically unsound. The lesson is that when home ownership is considered a “right” instead of a privilege, it is not only the housing market that goes bottom up. …
Power Line spots a 2003 NY Times article on Fannie/Freddie.
… ”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.” …
As usual, David Harsanyi has interesting thoughts.
Politicians expend a considerable amount of energy trying to prove they are just like you or me. Well, it turns out, they aren’t lying. Just like you and me, they have absolutely no clue what’s going on.
And watching these people endeavor to “rescue” us from financial apocalypse only crystallizes, once again, that Washington is the preferred destination of the ethically disabled.
Take John McCain’s reaction to the recent financial emergency. It was a progression of platitudinous canards brimming with crowd-pleasing words like “greed,” “speculators” and other assorted bogeymen.
McCain claimed that he would have fired Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for having “betrayed the public’s trust.” The fact that Cox didn’t actually break any laws or write any regulations is immaterial when a presidential candidate is stalking a scapegoat.
Then, in a bizarre moment during a “60 Minutes” interview, McCain the Maverick raised the possibility of tapping New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo to whip Wall Street into shape. “This may sound a little unusual,” McCain said. “I think he is somebody who could restore some credibility, lend some bipartisanship to this effort.”
Unusual, indeed. It did not go unnoticed by many onlookers that as the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Bill Clinton, Cuomo was one of the people who supported lending practices that allowed Fannie and Freddie to monopolize the sub-prime markets with risky loans and precious little oversight.
Ready to fire. Ready to hire. Ready to lead? …
The Economist reports on the privatization of Alaska halibut fisheries.
BEFORE 1995 the annual fishing season for Alaskan halibut lasted all of three days. Whatever the weather, come hell or—literally—high water, fishermen would be out on those few days trying to catch as much halibut as they could. Those that were lucky enough to make it home alive, or without serious injury, found that the price of halibut had collapsed because the market was flooded.
Like most other fisheries in the world, Alaska’s halibut fishery was overexploited—despite the efforts of managers. Across the oceans, fishermen are caught up in a “race to fish” their quotas, a race that has had tragic, and environmentally disastrous, consequences over many decades. But in 1995 Alaska’s halibut fishermen decided to privatise their fishery by dividing up the annual quota into “catch shares” that were owned, in perpetuity, by each fisherman. It changed everything. …
BBC News covers fishing privatization in other parts of the world.
Giving fishermen long-term rights to catch fish is key to keeping stocks healthy, scientists conclude.
A global survey found that fisheries managed using individual transferable quotas (ITQs) were half as likely to collapse as others. Long-term quotas give fishermen a stake in conserving fish stocks. The study was published in the journal Science just a day after the European Commission announced a major review of EU fisheries policy.
“Under open access, you have a free-for-all race to fish, which ultimately leads to collapse,” said research leader Christopher Costello from the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). “But when you allocate shares of the catch, then there is an incentive to protect it.”
The principle of ITQs is straightforward. A safe level of catch is set for a given species or group of species in a prescribed area, and that catch is shared out between individual boats or fleets. The total allowable catch can rise or fall from year to year according to what scientists judge to be sustainable. But the shares are guaranteed for a set number of years. They can be traded or transferred, but no new shares are allowed. …
WSJ reports on study of regional personality traits.
Certain regional stereotypes have long since become clichés: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.
But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?
You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.
Even after controlling for variables such as race, income and education levels, a state’s dominant personality turns out to be strongly linked to certain outcomes. Amiable states, like Minnesota, tend to be lower in crime. Dutiful states — an eclectic bunch that includes New Mexico, North Carolina and Utah — produce a disproportionate share of mathematicians. States that rank high in openness to new ideas are quite creative, as measured by per-capita patent production. But they’re also high-crime and a bit aloof. Apparently, Californians don’t much like socializing, the research suggests. …