Posted by
john on Wednesday, November 19, 2008 3:20:12 PM
What was it that Rahm Emmanuel recently said? A crisis is a terrible thing to waste?
Way, way back in September, weeks before the election, weeks even before I started this blog, I asked myself the following question: Given that most of the Democrat-installed crap had been stripped out of the $700B TARP legislation, why were the Dems nevertheless so much more enthusiastic about the bill than Republicans?
Answer: the big government boosters in Washington see, as the Chinese might, an "opportunity" in the financial "crisis". In the words of Vermont Socialist (his choice of labels, not mine) Bernie Sanders, "this can bring about a turn toward a new era. If we have the money to bail out Wall Street, we can provide funding for health care, childhood poverty infrastructure and sustainable energy."
I guess you can add to that list, the UAW, and probably a great grocery list of infrastructure (union boondoggle) projects. Anything else? Regardless of how long the list grows, the essential point is this: massive amounts of capital of the most scarce kind (the kind that requires the Treasury Dept. to print money) is going to be diverted to some really inefficient uses. This is no prescription for economic growth, and certainly not for any kind of bull market.
All of this begs another question, however. Does anyone in charge in Washington really care about economic growth? I'm reminded of a famous Great Depression/New Deal anecdote. Secretary Morgenthau featured a sign on his desk which asked "does it contribute to the recovery?" Upon seeing this, FDR chided him. The issue wasn't recovery, he said, "this is politics." For the feline Roosevelt, the Great Depression wasn't a crisis, it was an opportunity. As described by former WSJ editor Robert Bartley, it was, more specifically, an opportunity to replace one aristocracy with another. An opportunity to replace business as the dominant force in American life, with bureaucrats and politicians - a permanent political class in Washington.
I'm afraid that like FDR, Rahm Emmanuel - and one must assume Barry O - isn't interested in economic growth nearly as much as politics. Specifically, entrenching in Washington an even more permenant political class made up of an aristocracy of people who had a talent for taking tests as teenagers, and for little else, yet nevertheless believe themselves expert in everything and subordinate to no one outside their tribe. These twerps need people to need them, and a Reaganesque America in which opportunity abounds for anyone with talent and ambition - regardless of their SAT scores - is therefore anathema.
Rush was once fond of lecturing that the difference between us and them is that they measure policy and political success by how many people are getting government aid; while we'd measure success by how many people don't need government. It has been characteristic of the Left since the New Deal to claim, a la Professor Higgins, that we NEED them. And to prove it, they're going to kill the private economy. I hope this doesn't end the same way the Great Depression did.