Archive for 2010
May 13, 2010
We tend to think of “bureaucracy” as meaning sluggish, complicated, unresponsive paperwork and process. But it has another, more threatening meaning: Rule by the bureaucrats, just as “aristocracy” is rule by the aristocrats—in other words, rule by unelected officers who impose their ideas on you, but cannot be voted out by you or anyone else. Bureaucracy in this sense has an inherent love of power and yearning for authority which cannot be questioned.
Consider the recent activities of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC criticized Goldman Sach’s synthetic CMO deal. Whatever one may think of the merits of the deal, should you be able to disagree with an attack on you by a bureaucracy? Goldman Sachs publicly disagreed. The SEC got the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation. Warren Buffett defended Goldman Sachs. The SEC announced it was investigating inadequate disclosures by Buffett’s company.
Coincidence? Or a message that you will certainly be punished if you dare to disagree with the bureaucrats?
The counter-weapon is to name names. Bureaucracy hides behind institutions. Individual bureaucrats hate attention and accountability. Name the individual actors and criticize them by name, not by institution.
EUGENE VOLOKH ON bisexual erasure. Well, the Kagan nomination certainly seems to have inspired one of those “national conversations” people are always calling for — this time on sexuality.
POLARIZATION starts at the top.
A NEW OBAMACARE LAWSUIT. “In the complaint, the material about the interstate commerce power and the tax power is fairly standard. What makes the lawsuit significant is a well-developed argument (subject, of course, to the caveat that a complaint is not a brief) on medical privacy issues.”
WITH 95% APPROVAL: Quebec Says ‘Non’ to the Niqab.
SHOULD WE BE getting ready for North Korea to collapse?
WELL, DUH: Tyler Cowen Reads–and Knows–More Than You.
JONATHAN TURLEY: Too Much Harvard and Yale: “When you virtually exclude all but two of the nation’s 160 law schools as sources for justices, it not only reduces the number of outstanding candidates but guarantees a certain insularity in training and influences on the court. This bias is not only elitist but decidedly anti-intellectual. Moreover, there is no objective basis for favoring these two schools. . . . The favoritism shown Harvard and Yale should be viewed not just as incestuous but as scandalous. It undermines educational institutions across the country by maintaining a clearly arbitrary and capricious basis for selection. It also runs against the grain of a nation based on meritocracy and opportunity.”
THE SUPREME COURT’S DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Just the tip of the iceberg?
Following Elena Kagan’s nomination, a few people are waking up to a rather startling reality: In what is supposed to be a new era of American openness, egalitarianism, and diversity, Harvard and Yale grads are dominant. If Kagan is confirmed, every single member of the Supreme Court will have attended Harvard or Yale. But that’s not all. Harvard Law grad Barack Obama beat Yale grad Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then became president. Yale grad George W. Bush beat Yale grad John Kerry and Harvard grad Al Gore. Yale grad Bill Clinton beat Yale grad George H. W. Bush. In fact, you have to go back a full generation, to Eureka College’s finest, Ronald Reagan, for America’s last non-Ivy president.
Though hardly an argument against going beyond Harvard and Yale.
EXPIRATION DATE: Orszag: The president never “pledged” no new taxes; he simply “preferred.”
Hmm. Let’s go to the video. “A firm pledge” doesn’t mean “pledge” now, huh?
MEGAN MCARDLE: Are Democrats Plotting to Steal Your 401(k)? “They don’t need some secret, subtle way to take the contents of our retirement accounts; they can do it the normal way, by raising tax rates. (This, by the way, is why I’m not-so-hot on Roth IRAs; I suspect that there’s a fair danger that the capital gains in those accounts will ultimately be taxed, at least for wealthier retirees.)”
UPDATE: Reader Dale Burnett writes:
The fact that there is even conversation about the possibility of 401Ks being stolen is frightening. I’m not talking about some boogeyman that Republicans have ginned up. I’m talking about congressmen who have voiced nascent support for the idea. Any of them who contemplate that this *might* be a good idea should be tossed into the street. Some ideas should never even get to the contemplation stage.
And even the contemplation may tend to depress saving and investment, as fear of government expropriation tends to do.
VERONIQUE DE RUGY: In-the-Red State. “When we properly account for Social Security, our national deficit proves worse.”
TIM CAVANAUGH: Why Isn’t the Government Hiring Short Sellers?
Former Paulson analyst Paolo Pellegrini — who is best known for providing information to the Securities and Exchange Commission and for somehow being rich — discovered where the biggest bubbles had grown and which were in the process of blowing up. His bets against these bubbles, of course, turned out to be right.
Pellegrini figured all this out using information that was readily available to anybody who was sufficiently motivated. You would think somewhere in the United States government there might be such motivated people. After all, we have an SEC, a Federal Reserve Bank, a Treasury Department, the formerly government sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Census Bureau, many data collection and analysis agencies, and too many congressional committees. All of these entities have the stability of the economy as part of their job description. Yet all of them combined could not manage your money as intelligently as one short seller from Rome managed John Paulson’s.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “I’ve been working at hedge funds since 1997. The main reason the government isn’t hiring short sellers is because short sellers would never waste their time working for the government. Short sellers really are some of the smartest people in the investment world and they would never be able to handle living in an environment of mediocrity.”
MICKEY KAUS: “Spain’s Socialist prime minister has cut civil service pay by 5% and then freeze it in an attempt to reduce budget deficits by almost half (from over 11% to 6% of GDP) in two years. Try to imagine a California Democrat doing the same thing …”
TOO MANY IVY LEAGUERS? Walter Shapiro writes:
This is one of those moments when you sense that American democracy is more of a rigged game than they taught you back in high school civics classes. Few object to a meritocracy in which people, regardless of family backgrounds, are judged by what they have accomplished in life. But should that binding decision have been made by the admissions committees at two law schools when the applicants were still in their early 20s? Imagine a guidance counselor shouting, “Future Supreme Court justices over here. Everyone else, best of luck with your legal careers – if you don’t aim too high.”
Once the criterion was Harvard, Yale or bust, it was almost inevitable that Elena Kagan, the former dean of guess-what-law-school, would have been tapped for the Supreme Court. This is not an exaggeration. Let’s do the math together. . . . Because the enduring motto of the Supreme Court remains – equal justice under law from Harvard and Yale.
Read the whole thing.
May 12, 2010
NEWS I HOPE YOU CAN NEVER USE: How to care for wounds when the medical system has collapsed.
UH OH: Jupiter loses one of its stripes and scientists are stumped as to why. It’s obviously aliens. Moving closer from Saturn.
ROBERT SAMUELSON: Depression 2.0?
TEA PARTY PROTESTING OBAMA’S VISIT in Buffalo, tomorrow.
UPDATE: Reader Patrick Whittome writes:
Glenn,
A British perspective on borrowing:
In Europe the left wing governments are falling away. Greece is pushing through spending austerity because it has no choice. In Spain, Portugal, Germany and many other countries they are slashing spending because the Greek ending scares them to death. The UK just sacked its spendy lefty government and got one determined to accelerate spending cuts significantly. We may have been the bad boys on irresponsible public spending for ages – but boy are we now getting a serious re-education! Canada, Australia and Sweden are countries that have been to the edge, pulled back, cut back and have emerged much the stronger and better managed for it.
And that, for me, leaves behind just two big spending basket cases: Japan and the USA. Japan’s crunch will come in the next two years as domestic savings run out and they will have to start borrowing externally – and find that they can’t at reasonable interest rates. A Greek end game awaits them. I’d advise banks and businesses everywhere to cut their Japanese exposure right now because it won’t be pretty.
So that just leaves you chaps across the pond. Will the timetable of collapse be Greece today, California tomorrow, USA 2012? Who knows. Obama is a very engaging and articulate man – but he’s spending you guys into the dirt. It’s an existential risk not just a tough political issue. Please would you be so kind as to elect someone prepared to deal with it – coz if you sink we all do.
We’re doing what we can.
Ann Althouse asks: “I wonder what those percentages would be if the President and the political elite had not pressured us to think the Arizona law was outrageously racist.”
From the comments: “We’re seeing a crumbling of the left’s dogma and an end to the average person’s fear of an inquisition. This as a result of how ridiculous the left has become.”
THOUGHTS ON political incivility.
HARVARD AND YALE AND intellectual nondiversity.
UPDATE: Reader David McCourt writes: “So almost all the recent presidential candidates in our ‘classless society’ have gone to Harvard or Yale, and prep school also. What did you expect, that we’d be the kind of place where a guy who never went to college, and whose parents were circus performers, could become his country’s chief political leader? Leave that to hidebound old Britain (and John Major).”