The exercise now under way in Washington to reform our financial
services sector revisits what we just went through in health care.
Take a problem caused by government going where it doesn't belong
and then propose to solve it by doing even more of the same.
Only politicians could conclude that our lives will be more
financially secure if we create things with names like the Financial
Stability Oversight Council, the Office of Financial Research and
the Research and Analysis Center.
These new entities, under the reforms being pushed, would
comprise a great command center in which a whole army of newly
installed bureaucrats will survey the financial horizon and do
pre-emptive strikes on institutions they identify as wobbly.
Might we consider that anyone that could reliably predict and
identify banks that were going to fail could become filthy rich
working on their own buying and selling stocks of these
institutions?
So the bureaucrats that would assume these responsibilities will
either be so public-spirited that they choose to forego wealth in
order to protect us, or they will take these jobs pretending to do
something they cannot do – that
is impossible to do – and get a
safe, well-paying government job, paid, of course, by we taxpayers
whom they are allegedly protecting, as part of the bargain....
Folks, the Congressional Budget Office now shows that our
projected accumulated deficits for the next 10 years
– almost $13 trillion
– totals up to almost our whole
annual national output, our GDP. Now this same political class that
has us, our children and our grandchildren swimming in red ink
proposes to reform our financial system to make us more safe, stable
and secure.
How about the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency that
will be part of all this reform? Another army of bureaucrats in
place to make sure nasty bankers do not abuse us consumers.
But consumers are also citizens, and if our politicians are so
concerned about protecting us, why are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
not even part of this reform package?
It is these government-created entities that bought and insured
the lion's share of our mortgages over these years and have done so
with we consumers, aka citizens, aka taxpayers, guaranteeing them.
Now we taxpayers sit on the hook for trillions of dollars in debt as
a result of their follies.
The same politicians who spend our money, who use us to guarantee
their trillion-dollar social engineering schemes, claim they are
going to protect us? Give me a break.
Lurking behind all this is the myth recently described by British
historian Paul Johnson that "government treasuries can be run in a
fundamentally different way from the finances of private families."
The secret weapon of the politician is to seduce citizens into
abandoning their common sense. In the famous words of Groucho Marx,
"Who are you going to believe –
me or your own eyes?"
The way to protect citizens and consumers is simple and basic.
Have law that protects life and property, understand it to be sacred
and inviolable, and enforce it.
For those that read the Bible, it's the eighth commandment. Thou
shalt not steal.
Our great country is deeply divided today between two
irreconcilable worldviews.
According to one, we live in a nation with God-given law
– rights in the language of our
Declaration of Independence –
and the role of government is to enforce this law.
In the other view, we elect politicians and give them authority
to make it all up as they go along.
We've been living a lot of years trying to do both. Now things
are just too out of hand.
We're going to have to decide which it is and who we are. This
will determine our future.
