Security theater endures to absurd levels. Is this dispositive proof that citizens no longer can limit abuses of power by the federal government?:
More Security Theater
4
Category Archives: Politics – General
It’s not rocket science, part II
With high levels of municipal debt reverberating around the country, Alex Pollack provides this timely post on the what happened when New York City couldn’t find any buyers for its municipal bonds back in 1975.
As Pollack explains, despite dire warnings of disaster from the financial pundits of the day, the Ford Administration declined to have the federal government bail-out New York City from its bond default. After NYC defaulted, disaster did not occur and the world financial system did not collapse.
Does that fear-mongering remind you of anything that occurred more recently?
Remember, this really is not rocket science.
The Great Retirement Swap
The concept of retirement is undergoing fundamental change. Does anyone really believe anymore that it’s possible for most folks to live comfortably over the final third of their lives while essentially generating no income?
That changing dynamic is behind such ventures as the Great Retirement Swap:
The way that we think about retirement in America is fundamentally flawed. The current retirement system assumes that people must diligently invest in the stock market over an extended period of 30 years or more in order to buy things in the future – like food, shelter, and clothing.
But what if people are free to share, barter and swap for these goods? To travel to wherever they want, provided someone has a spare room for them to use? To have access to any item they need, as long as they have an item of similar value to swap? [. . .]
Well, what if we fundamentally change the way we think about retirement to take into account the new trend toward collaborative consumption? Call it The Great Retirement Swap. At a macro-level, Americans would be swapping a bleak version of retirement for a positive, hopeful one.
At a more tactical level, older Americans would be swapping for goods and services, rather than owning them. Wealth in retirement would become a relative issue – are you wealthier if you own a second home in Florida, or if you have unfettered access to apartments across Europe, at any time of the year? [. . .]
While all this sounds a bit "un-capitalistic," it’s actually the free market at work, on a grand scale. When you barter for goods, there is a market price established for those goods. And best of all, it doesn’t require 7% annual compounded returns in the stock market to succeed.
With millions of Baby Boomers set to start retiring within the next few years, retirement nest eggs shattered by the financial crisis, and even eternal optimists convinced that Social Security is no longer sustainable in the long-run, it’s time to start thinking of a ground-breaking, innovative – dare I say it – radical solution for helping Americans attain the type of retirement they always dreamed of in their golden years.
Regardless of the feasibility of the Great Retirement Swap, what are the chances that government will do a better job than markets in providing choices for retirees?
Elie Wiesel on the perils of indifference
Why We Need to Protect Bradley Manning and R. Allen Stanford
Glenn Greenwald has done an outstanding job of directing the blogosphere’s attention toward the U.S. Army’s inhumane pre-trial imprisonment of Private Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing classified information to WikiLeaks, which in turn published the info for the world to read.
The Manning affair has been bubbling just below the surface of public controversy for the past nine months. However, it started to become a full-blown public scandal last week when President Obama – who campaigned on the disingenuous slogan of “change we can believe in” – endorsed the military’s brutal treatment of this innocent young man while giving a feckless answer to a question about Manning’s treatment during a press conference.
Now, the Manning affair is turning into a firestorm. In addition to this scathing NY Times editorial, Greenwald’s latest post links to the international attention that our government’s abusive treatment of Manning is getting. Constitutional Law scholar Jack Balkin and his colleagues over at Balkinization have prepared and are circulating this excellent statement to the Obama Administration condemning the “degrading and inhumane” conditions of Manning’s “illegal and immoral” detention.
I applaud Greenwald for focusing attention on the gross injustice of the Manning case and for the others who are now objecting publicly to this outrageous misuse of governmental power. As with the government’s vapid security theater and overcriminalization of American life, Manning’s treatment is another powerful reminder of just how remote and unresponsive the government has become to civilized society.
Meanwhile, though, I’m wondering about something.
Why is Manning’s treatment – as barbaric as it is – generating much more outcry than the arguably worse treatment that R. Allen Stanford has received during his pre-trial incarceration?
If we are going to forego protecting the innocent because the accusations against them are serious and seemingly compelling, then – as Thomas More reminds us — “when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, . . . the laws all being flat?”
“This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, . . . do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
“Yes, I’d give the Devil the benefit of the law.”
“For my own safety’s sake.”
The Regulatory Mindset
Richard Epstein is typically lucid in taking on the increasingly foreboding regulatory culture that creates barriers for entrepreneurial creation of jobs and wealth:
What is to be done about the compliance culture–a culture born in response to excessive regulation–that now threatens to compromise the technological advances that have long spurred innovation in the United States?
This sad chronicle of relative decline takes place in three separate stages.
The first involves the new mindset that too often finds harmful externalities and bargaining breakdowns in virtually all human endeavors.
The second involves the bulky remedial structures that government puts in place to respond to these newly identified perils.
The third stage involves the subtle alterations in the selection of the compliance culture: the rise government officials and key private officers and executives whose skills matter ever more in these more severe regulatory environments.
This three-fold progression is not specific to this or that industry, but applies across the board. . . . [. . .]
No one should be so reckless as to claim that these forces operate in all cases in all ways. We still have our wonderful success stories. Yet by the same token, no one should be so naïve as to think that these forces have no role to play in the loss of innovation and competitiveness in this country, a loss felt in both absolute and comparative senses. This loss has become an ever-larger feature of the modern United States.
Stated another way, it’s not that rules are unnecessary for markets to perform efficiently. But what type of rules are better?
Rules that politicians enact and governmental officials enforce generally are far less efficient than rules that emerge as a result of the voluntary interactions of millions of individuals and companies. The successes and mistakes of those individuals and companies pursuing their own interests create rules that are the product of competition and personal responsibility. When those rules become sufficiently important in the fabric of a market economy, they become formalized as common law and precedent by courts.
The distinction between inefficient government-imposed rules and the decentralized rules that facilitate productive market economies is an important one to understand as we wade through the carnage of this current era of increasing governmental regulation.
What are we doing to ourselves?
Overcriminalization of life in America has been a frequent topic on this blog.
Mark Perry’s post places the topic in perspective.
A truly civil society would find a better way.
Jeff Miron on Libertarianism
Is entitlement reform our generational challenge?
Henry Blodget passes along this revealing Mary Meeker graph on how bloated entitlement programs now comprise a staggering 58% of federal government expenditures and a corresponding portion of the $1.3 trillion federal deficit.
In his wonderfully lucid style, the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins follows up with this column in which he explains how this system is intrinsically unsustainable, but also fixable:
Nobody should be surprised that public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are fighting to preserve every penny of their promised benefits.[ . . .]
. . . this fight was penciled in long ago, when politicians and union leaders made the strategic decision to negotiate benefits without negotiating for the funding to make good on them. The mock shock and horror is all the more laughable given that events in Wisconsin are a perfect microcosm of the battle that every sentient American knows, and has known for a generation, awaits Medicare and Social Security.
Medicare is the real killer. According to Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute, an average couple retiring last year can look forward to consuming Medicare benefits with a present value of $343,000, having paid Medicare taxes with a present value of $109,000. [. . .]
The flip side of this depressing consideration, though, is a happier one. Moving toward a system of real savings, in which payroll taxes would flow into some version of personal accounts controlled by the worker, would bring a big improvement to incentives. We could expect a sizeable growth dividend to help finance the transition.
By "finance the transition," of course, we mean today’s workers having to reach into their own pockets twice, paying for their own retirement while also making up for the saving their parents and grandparents didn’t do. When people talk about generational injustice, this is what they mean. But the pain can be lightened and spread more evenly with borrowing. Here’s where we should not be afraid of debt. The bond market can be trusted to distinguish between good debt and bad debt–between borrowing to fix the system and borrowing to prop it up.
The global bond market demonstrably still has confidence in America even today, in the absence of a clear path of reform. How much more willing would investors be to advance us money if it were being used to put the entitlement state on a sound, pro-growth footing? By the same token, if we don’t at some point justify the market’s current confidence in our future, our comeuppance will be swift and overwhelming.
This is the entire political challenge today, and you cannot shower enough contempt on those politicians who try to stonewall reform by exciting fears in the elderly that they will be left out in the cold. . . .
Recent past generations of Americans survived the challenges of the Great Depression and World War II to help provide a prosperous economy and great wealth for citizens.
Will the current generations of Americans accept the responsibility to take on the challenge of sustaining that prosperity?