[Rhodes22-list] Special Reprint to Stan Spitzer, Ron Lipton, Slim Alm, David Bradley, and others (Political)

[Tootle]

Jewish World Review January 2, 2008 / 24 Teves, 5768 

Santa Claus politics By Thomas Sowell 

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com  

Senator Hillary Clinton's Christmas commercial, showing various government
programs as presents under a Christmas tree, was a classic example of
calculated confusion in politics. 

Anyone who believes that the government can give the country presents has
fallen for the oldest political illusion of all — the illusion of something
for nothing. 

Santa Claus may turn out to be the real front-runner in the primaries,
judging by the way candidates are vying with one another to give away
government goodies to the voters. 

Santa Claus is bipartisan. The Bush administration is unveiling its plan to
rescue people who gambled and lost in the housing markets when the bubble
burst. 

We now have a bipartisan tradition of the government stepping in to rescue
people who engaged in risky behavior — whether by locating in the known
paths of hurricanes in Florida or in areas repeatedly hit by wildfires over
the years in California or by doing things that increase the probability of
catching AIDS. 

Why not also rescue people who gambled away their life's savings in Las
Vegas? That would at least be consistent. 

Apparently the only people who are supposed to be responsible are the
taxpayers — and they are increasingly made responsible for other people's
irresponsibility. 

Military conscription is long gone. But taxpayers are still being
conscripted to play Santa Claus. 

If taking our money and wasting it — or, rather, using it to buy votes — was
all the damage that politicians did to the economy, that would be Utopia
compared to all the damage they actually do. 

What's more, politicians can picture themselves as the solutions to our
economic problems, when in fact they are the biggest economic problem of
all. 

To this day, there are people who believe that the market economy failed
when the stock market crashed in 1929 and that the Great Depression of the
1930s that followed required government intervention. 

In reality, the stock market crashed by almost exactly the same amount on
almost the same day in 1987 — and 20 years of prosperity, low inflation and
low unemployment followed. 

What was the difference? 

Politicians — first President Hoover and then President Roosevelt — decided
that they had to "do something" after the stock market crash of 1929. 

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan decided to do nothing — despite bitter
criticisms in the media — and the economy recovered on its own and kept on
growing. 

To people who think the government should "do something" — and this includes
most of the media — it would never occur to them to compare the actual track
record of what happens when the government does something and what happens
when it lets the market adjust by itself. 

Back in 1971, President Richard Nixon responded to widespread demands that
he "do something" about rising prices by imposing wage and price controls
that got him re-elected in a landslide. Moreover, the later damage to the
economy was seldom blamed on those price controls. 

Recently, Professor N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard, a former chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers, noted that people in Congress and the White
House were wondering what they should do about the current economic
situation. His suggestion: "Absolutely nothing." 

It is not just free market economists who think the government can do more
harm than good when they intervene in the economy. It was none other than
Karl Marx who referred to "crackbrained meddling by the authorities" that
can "aggravate an existing crisis." 

Ronald Reagan and Karl Marx did not have much in common, except that they
had both studied economics. 

After the departure of Senator Phil Gramm and House Majority Leader Dick
Armey, Congress has been an economics-free zone. There is not one economist
among the 535 members of Congress. 

But, in an election year, that is not a political handicap. Santa Claus has
won far more elections than any economist. 

Posted by 
Ed K
Ask for the truth... not the Marxist big lie...


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