John Stossel’s commentary on Townhall.com details why the recent Madoff scam brouhaha wonderfully illustrates why government regulation rarely, if ever, works, and in fact often makes things worse.
The $50-billion investment scam allegedly pulled off by Wall Street insider Bernard Madoff has ignited predictable calls for more regulation.
The “massive fraud … was made possible in part because the regulators who were assigned to oversee Wall Street dropped the ball,” said President-elect Obama.
“This scandal underscores the need for a 21st century regulatory approach,” writes Arthur Levitt Jr., former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in The Wall Street Journal.
Notice the disconnect. Regulation failed, so we need more regulation. I see it differently. Regulation failed, so let’s try free markets. That would be a change.
Regulation did indeed fail. “An executive in the securities industry, Harry Markopolos, contacted the SEC’s Boston office in May 1999, urging regulators to investigate Mr. Madoff. Mr. Markopolos continued to pursue his accusations over the past nine years,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
President George W. Bush on Tuesday declared an emergency in the District of Columbia that will let the nation’s capital tap deeper into federal coffers for Barack Obama’s inauguration.
What? Since when is a presidential inauguration an emergency? Isn’t now the time for frugality?
Quotes of the Day: “I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution.” – President-elect Barack Obama
“Under my administration, the United States does not torture. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest values and ideals. We must adhere to values as vigilantly as we protect our safety.” – President-elect Barack Obama
“I think it is important for us to do that not only because that’s who we are, but also because it will ultimately make us safer, and will help in changing hearts and minds in our struggle against extremists.” – President-elect Barack Obama
Subject: Obama says good things
Yesterday’s Dispatch made the point that the managers of DownsizeDC.org are philosophically anti-partisan and anti-politician. If you haven’t read yesterday’s Dispatch, we hope you do. The points we made, and the shocking results of a scientific study we shared, are important to us. You can find it on our blog.
In that Dispatch we asserted that we’re going to apply the same standards to the new president that we applied to President Bush. This means that we’ll not only criticize the new president when he does bad things, but also praise and support him when he does good things. To be honest, we didn’t get many chances to praise Bush.
But today provides an opportunity to praise and support President-elect Obama.
This week he introduced his new intelligence team. In doing so he made some very good promises and statements of principle. We’ve used them as our quotes of the day. We agree with everything the President-elect says in the quotes above. We want to help him achieve these objectives.
The veneer on the Barackcuda’s real agenda has worn thin even before he takes office.
by Jake, the Champion of the Constitution
Originally published January 13, 2009 at http://www.nolanchart.com/article5792.html
Previously on this site I have avoided articles centered on religion, Israel-Palestine, and global warming even though I have very strong views on these three “taboo” topics. This column started off as antiwar and will remain focused on monetary policy for reasons I explain in the Money Matrix series, but recently I have felt like writing about the Gaza situation and now about Global Warming theory. C’est la vie!
Part 1 is on the Browner selection, Part 2 is on climate change theory.
President-Elect Barack Obama has named Carol Browner as Global Warming Czar. I confess I have no idea why naming unelected individuals to a made-up, unconstitutional office post and then giving them the nickname of an aristocratic Russian emperor is such a beloved tradition with US presidents – drug czars, poverty czars, terror czars – the American people have seen them all and quite frankly they all have not done much. Obama has really shown us his true colors by, among many other “stellar” picks, retaining Bush’s Secretary of War Robert Gates, making former Israeli Defense Force mechanic and Civilian National Enslavement proponent Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, and a lifetime bureaucrat, the 70-year-old Leon Panetta as CIA Director who has zero CIA experience unless he was undercover in the House of Representatives for the 16 years and for 4 years as Clinton’s Chief of Staff, in which case he sure fooled us! Now we have outright socialist czarettes placed into power!
As usual, Ron Paul has some common sense to impart in his weekly Texas Straight Talk column regarding all this talk of more economic stimulus packages coming down the pike:
With attention turning to the next big economic stimulus package, questions are still swirling about our economic troubles.How did we get here?How do we get out?As usual, Washington has all the wrong answers.According to many politicians, we got here by not spending enough, not consuming enough, and not regulating enough.Now government, like some mythical white knight, is going to ride in to save the day by blanketing the economy with dollars, hiring an army of new bureaucrats, creating make-work jobs, and sending everyone some form of a bailout check.The debate seems to focus on whether this will cost enough to save the economy, or if this is just a “down payment” with much more government spending to come.Talk like that would be comical, if the results weren’t going to be so tragic. Continue reading here.
When Walter Sharpe received the certified letter on Feb. 6, 2001, he knew the complaint for child support was a mistake.
Andre Sharpe had a different date of birth, a different Social Security number and different previous addresses.
Andre Sharpe also had an 11-year-old daughter with a woman in Harrisburg, and Walter Sharpe knew he had been to Harrisburg only once, to register a car. He also knew he hadn’t fathered a child to a woman named Terri Jones on that trip.
So he ignored it.
Big mistake.
A court entered a default judgment against Sharpe, and for the next six years, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania hounded former trash collector to collect child support for the girl. He lost his job, paid more than $12,000 in support and fines, became estranged from his family (he has four kids of his own), and was jailed four times for failing to make payments. The county denied his repeated requests for a DNA paternity test (and were backed up by the courts), arguing that its domestic relations officials had sufficiently confirmed paternity “after reasonable investigation.”
Walter Sharpe’s attorney alleges that when he appeared in person with personal information proving he couldn’t be the father, county officials merely changed the biographical information on the custody forms to match Walter Sharpe’s.
After looking into Sharpe’s story, the Patriot-News newspaper was able to determine the child’s real father, Andrew Sharpe, in less than an hour. That’s because the girl has been living with him for the last four years. The girl’s grandmother (who had custody for a time) says the real father has supported the girl the entire time. The article isn’t clear on where Walter Sharpe’s support payments have gone.
In May 2007, a judge finally ruled that Walter Sharpe isn’t the girl’s father. But last October the same judge refused to reimburse Walter Sharpe for any of his past payments, much less all the damage done to him by the mistake.
Obama promises to change the way Washington operates? In an article at Reason.com, Nick Gillespie points out Obama’s apparent change of heart:
As you may recall, he was quite emphatic about how his administration would insist on doing things differently:
We are going to ban all earmarks—the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review,” he explained. “We will create an economic recovery oversight board made up of key administration officials and independent advisors to identify problems early and make sure we are doing all we can to solve it.”
Well, forget about it. In these tough times, the last thing you want to do is insist on principles. (And let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether the stimulus package is itself simply a way of pushing massive earmarked spending).
Here he is talking to ABC News:
In an interview taped for ABC News on Saturday, Obama said he wants targeted tax cuts and conceded it will be difficult to enforce his pledge to ban lawmakers from including unessential “earmarked” spending projects for their districts.
“In a package of this magnitude, will there end up being certain projects that potentially don’t meet that criteria of helping on health care, energy or education? Certainly,” he said.
But Obama said inaction carries too great a risk.
“We can’t afford three, four, five, six more months where we’re losing half a million jobs per month,” Obama said. “And the estimates are that if we don’t do anything, we could see million jobs lost this year.”
As you may recall, he was quite emphatic about how his administration would insist on doing things differently:
We are going to ban all earmarks—the process by which individual members insert pet projects without review,” he explained. “We will create an economic recovery oversight board made up of key administration officials and independent advisors to identify problems early and make sure we are doing all we can to solve it.”
Well, forget about it. In these tough times, the last thing you want to do is insist on principles. (And let’s leave aside for the moment the question of whether the stimulus package is itself simply a way of pushing massive earmarked spending).
Here he is talking to ABC News:
In an interview taped for ABC News on Saturday, Obama said he wants targeted tax cuts and conceded it will be difficult to enforce his pledge to ban lawmakers from including unessential “earmarked” spending projects for their districts.
“In a package of this magnitude, will there end up being certain projects that potentially don’t meet that criteria of helping on health care, energy or education? Certainly,” he said.
But Obama said inaction carries too great a risk.
“We can’t afford three, four, five, six more months where we’re losing half a million jobs per month,” Obama said. “And the estimates are that if we don’t do anything, we could see million jobs lost this year.”
I’m surprised that Peter Schiff didn’t resort to violence against Stephen Leeb during their appearance on CNN the other day. Leeb asks an idiotic question which Schiff answers then Leeb keeps on interrupting him about not answering the question.
Schiff continues to predict that the U.S. is headed for an inflationary depression and that government intervention is the cause of it all.
In the latest interview with Ron Paul with Russia Today he continues making claims that reveal why he is loved by so many people dreaming of hearing the truth from our representatives.
Perusing several comments found on liberal and conservative blogs the sentiment seems to be of the form, “I respect Ron Paul for telling the truth, but I still think he’s crazy and would never vote for him.” I think that sums up the main reason he didn’t win the GOP nomination. People truly respect his honesty but he may be too honest for the average voter. It’s almost like voters seek liars rather than truth tellers for public office.
Of course in my mind’s eye I see crowds of average Americans with sheep-like bodies wandering the streets on election day mindlessly chanting: “We can’t handle the truth. We can’t handle the truth.”
Hopefully in the coming 2010 and 2012 elections Americans find new respect for the truth. For a good start check out the interview below with Ron Paul.
Liberty Maven
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