EppsNet

Most of us believe in our hearts that there is only one good and that ideally everyone should pursue it. In a perfect centrally planned socialist state everyone is part of a hierarchy pursuing the same end. If that end is the one true good, that society will be perfect in a sense in which a capitalist society, where everyone pursues his own differing and imperfect perception of the good, cannot be. Since most socialists imagine a socialist government to be controlled by people very like themselves, they imagine that it will pursue the true good—the one that they, imperfectly, perceive. That is surely better than a chaotic system in which all sorts of people other than the socialists perceive all sorts of other goods and waste valuable resources chasing them. People who dream about a socialist society rarely consider the possibility that some of those other people may succeed in imposing their ends on the dreamer, instead of the other way around. George Orwell is the only exception who comes to mind.

— David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom

Today, I will introduce the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act, which removes government subsidies from the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and the National Home Loan Bank Board. . . . Congress should act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors who were misled by foolish government interference in the market.

— Ron Paul, 2003

[HT: Steven Landsburg]

Libertarianism rests on two bedrock beliefs: human freedom is a great good and the public sector tends to screw things up. The first belief is based more on faith than empirical result; the second derives from millennia of human experience.

— Edward L. Glaeser

I do not believe that the federal government should have a central and powerful place in American life. I believe in freedom and self-reliance.

Some people, like President Obama, disagree with me. He believes you should part company with your freedom and your money for the privilege of having the government take care of you — wipe your collective backsides, so to speak — from cradle to grave.

In which case — why doesn’t he know how to plug an oil leak?

— Tom

Many large companies are examining a course that was heretofore unthinkable, dumping the health care coverage they provide to their workers in exchange for paying penalty fees to the government.

That would dismantle the employer-based system that has reigned since World War II. It would also seem to contradict President Obama’s statements that Americans who like their current plans could keep them. And as we’ll see, it would hugely magnify the projected costs for the bill, which controls deficits only by assuming that America’s employers would remain the backbone of the nation’s health care system.

Hence, health-care reform risks becoming a victim of unintended consequences.

— Fortune, May 5, 2010

We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.

— Nancy Pelosi, March 9, 2010

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

— TJ

My fellow Americans –

This is a glorious day in our great nation! No, I’m not referring to that tragedy of a health care bill, which I’ll get to in a moment. I’m talking about Free Pastry Day at Starbucks! Who doesn’t enjoy a tasty scone with his morning coffee?

Now, on a more somber note . . .

Goodbye, representative democracy! Farewell, consent of the governed!

President Obama today signed into law a far-reaching measure that will affect everyone living in these United States, now and in the future. It is opposed by most of the country and it is now law.

I would never have believed that the government I helped to establish would one day engage in this kind of forced sodomy against its own people.

We know what is right and we will do it, regardless of whether you want it done to you or not.

If Karl Marx were here, he would no doubt make a case for trading off liberty in favor of whatever it’s called when a centralized authority redistributes your income in the interest of “equality.” If you know even a little bit about American history, I guess you know which side of that fence old Tom Jefferson is on.

Switching from politics to economics: People with insurance use more health care resources than people without. Put another stitch in my head, doc! I’ve got insurance!

If more people have insurance, it will increase the demand for health care, which in turn will increase the price.

Now imagine that everyone has insurance. I got your health care reform right here: We’re going to drive the price of health care through the roof, then spend a titanic amount of money helping poor people afford it.

I have no (proven) living descendants and for that I say — Thank God! The next generation of Americans is going to be crushed under the burden of paying for this misguided vision of government.

Yours in sadness and in hope,

Tom

• RT @capricecrane: "Twitter" was the most used word of 2009. Numbers two and three were "I'm" and "broke." #
• RT @Aimee_B_Loved: Sometimes I drive between lanes and pretend my car is Pacman gobbling up the dashed lines. #
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  http://j.mp/cthirsh #
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• RT @capricecrane: I don't know how your car got dented. Maybe it's God saying you shouldn't have cut me off for that parking space. Or me. #
• RT @diablocody: Eating a gingerbread house for breakfast. A new low. #
• RT @capricecrane: According to Billboard: "Nickelback: 'Band of the decade.'" That's all. Enjoy the apocalypse. #
• RT @TheOnion: "Why do all the girls I like think of me as just a friend? And why isn't there a term to describe that relationship?" -Plato #

When the government runs healthcare . . .

Liver cancer sufferers are being condemned to an early death by being denied a new drug on the Health Service, campaigners warn. They criticised draft guidance that will effectively ban the drug sorafenib — which is routinely used in every other country where it is licensed. Trials show the drug, which costs £36,000 [$60,000] a year, can increase survival by around six months for patients who have run out of options.

The Government’s rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) said the overall cost was “simply too high” to justify the “benefit to patients.”

— Mail Online

• Bentham vs. Hume – http://bit.ly/1OxVQL #

The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

The new projections add approximately $2 trillion to budget deficits through 2019. Earlier this year, the administration had predicted that Obama’s policies would require the government to spend $7.108 trillion more than it collects in tax revenue over the next decade.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report will not be formally released until Tuesday, said the change is due primarily to updated projections of economic growth that are far less rosy than data used when the White House released its first long-term budget outlook in February.

— washingtonpost.com

I think I’d be way more upset about this if the numbers weren’t beyond human comprehension . . .

There are some things that one just didn’t do. That’s the way I was brought up. It’s not gray; it was black and white.

Now the ethical standard seems to be if everybody else is doing it, I can do it too. Carry that over into the banking. Everybody else is doing these funny loans and having earnings grow faster, building up their margins, leveraging those margins.

The more leverage A gets, the more leverage B feels inclined to get. So the system fed on itself and drove bankers to making decisions that they, presumably, should have known better than to make.

I don’t blame government for this. I was at a meeting of CEOs, even though I haven’t been to one for quite a while, and someone asked me to sum up the morning. This was a bunch of bankers and other CEOs. They said, what do you think about all this?

I said, you know, what I’m hearing here is you’re blaming the government for allowing you to do what you should have had enough brains not to do in the first place.

— John Bogle

Donald Marron points out that another one of those great cost-saving ideas in the healthcare debate (the Independent Medicare Advisory Council) has taken a hit:

CBO estimates that the proposed legislation would save a paltry $2 billion over the next ten years, less than 1/500 of the 10-year cost of health reform.

Damn that CBO! They keep killing all these great ideas with, like, analysis and numbers and all that stuff. Everything would work out just fine if only they would close their eyes, click their heels together three times, and say, “There is no policy like reform…there is no policy like reform….”

— Greg Mankiw

I tend to distrust power unchecked by competition. This makes me particularly suspicious of federal policies that take a strong role in directing private decisions. I am much more willing to have state and local governments exercise power in a variety of ways than for the federal government to undertake similar actions. I can more easily move to another state or town than to another nation. (I am not good with languages.)

— Greg Mankiw

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — If anyone could emerge from the AIG bonus debacle looking good, it could be New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

— “NY’s Cuomo wins praise for pursuing AIG on bailout”

Cuomo. KWOH-moh. Italian, I suppose.

I have no personal animosity toward Mr. Cuomo, but despite his favorable write-ups in the press, he is certainly no hero in these matters.

Americans have short memories. Even members of the press — or “the media,” as you now call them — who should provide context and perspective, have short memories.

Set the Wayback Machine to 1995. Bill Clinton is president and Henry Cisneros, the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, institutes a requirement that 42 percent of the mortgages financed by government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac serve low- and moderate-income families.

Things only got worse under Cisneros’ successor, Andrew Cuomo:

Cuomo raised that number to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages in underserved neighborhoods and for the “very-low-income.” Part of the pitch was racial, with Cuomo contending that Fannie and Freddie weren’t granting mortgages to minorities at the same rate as the private market. William Apgar, Cuomo’s top aide, told The Washington Post: “We believe that there are a lot of loans to black Americans that could be safely purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if these companies were more flexible.”

— “Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie,” The Village Voice

Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s put half of the GSE money into mortgages for very low income black people! And let’s not trouble them for a down payment either:

Fannie also developed a “flexible” product line, providing up to 100 percent financing and requiring borrowers to make as little as a $500 contribution, and bought $13.7 billion of those loans in 2003.

And yet I often hear the ensuing financial meltdown being blamed on “greed” and “the evils of capitalism.”

That was not capitalism; that was government manipulation of the housing market.

Americans have very short memories . . .

Congress doesn’t have its own stash [of money]. Every dollar it injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It’s merely redistributed from one group of people to another.

— Brian Reidl, The Wall Street Journal

As you probably learned in school, we founded this country as a free-market economy and viewed government intervention in the market with the greatest skepticism.

The above article is the clearest explanation I’ve seen for why bailouts and “stimulus plans” involving government spending never work.

The latest failed companies hoping for a bailout are General Motors and Ford. I hope Henry Ford — a great American like myself, who is currently whirling like a lathe in his Detroit grave — will pardon me for saying so, but these companies are nothing but engines of mass financial destruction.

According to the WSJ, GM and Ford invested a combined $465 billion between 1998 and 2007.

As of last Friday’s market close, they had market caps of $4 billion (Ford) and $1.7 billion (GM).

They’ve wiped out almost $460 billion of American capital in the last 10 years and now they want more money.

Look — my friend Paul Epps has a sister who spent every dollar she ever had on booze, drugs and abortions. For a while, friends and family members tried to help her by giving her money when she didn’t have any.

Do I have to tell you how that turned out?

I’m not suggesting that executives at Ford and GM spent the $460 billion on booze, drugs and abortions — not all of it anyway — but I am saying that sometimes people who don’t have any money can’t be helped by giving them more money.

Fed to crack down on shady lending practices

— msnbc.com

Quant le cheval est emblé dounke ferme fols l’estable.

— Les Proverbes del Vilain