Mitt Romney willfully unlearns his life lessons

Ron Paul is the only candidate that declares the emperor is naked! He wants to cut whole departments. Mitt Romney on the other hand wants to add more aircraft carriers to our naval fleet.  Who is the one willfully unknowing the known, that we are broke?   I hate seeing Mitt compromise and deny his personally conservative and money responsible upbringing with a politically blind appeasement to foreign adventure minded neocons. If he were at Bain and running a firm similar to the U. S. Government he would be attacking the budget with a meat cleaver. I can't stand the fact that he so wants to be President that he does not articulate any such thought.  He is willfully unlearning his life's lessons of prudent, modest and parsimonious behavior.

Unknowing the known - The Banks

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's January 1st opinion piece in the NYT unveils a political newspeak that I am not comfortable with. Generally it's a political discussion of truths that knock out all further investigation of a line of reasoning.  The editorial mentions Donald Rumsfeld famous line of knowns and unknowns. First there are the known knowns, then the known unknowns and thirdly the unknown unknowns. But curiously it takes an Irish author, Fintan O'Toole to illuminate the fourth of the series, the willfully unknown known.

The piece goes on to describe the Iraqi war and the Madoff ponzi scam as examples of willfully unknowing the known.  I find, with the exception of Ron Paul, that our political class on both sides of the aisle of practicing the unlearning of lessons learned. The best example that I can think of is the Pecora commission of 1933 which created the the Glass Steagall act.  The past fifty years was the gradual undoing of the act.  Today's version of Glass Steagall, Dodd Frank, will not withstand the test of time because it does not separate investment from commercial banks.  It's the known risk of giving a banker a huge bonus or the taxpayer a giant liability that is compromised out of Dodd Frank so that its an exercise in regulatory masturbation, much heat generated for no purpose.  Glass Steagall had a framework that was very clear. There was a need for bank services and insurance of those services in case of a calamitous event.  In order to play with FDIC insurance banks had to follow bank regulations and pay for the insurance. It works well as long as there are many small players where none are TBTF, so a new requirement should be that no bank can control assets more than x percent of GDP.   One tenth of one percent sounds good to me.  If you want to be free to fail then as a bank you opt out and serve as an investment bank with no safety net for the partners or customers.



  

The Straits of Hormuz

Once again this narrow stretch is being used as a threat, so what should we do?  I may sound like a broken record, but how about an emergency increase in the imported oil tariff of $50 a barrel? It's a message to oil market to drop its price which then reduces the Iranian threat as well as their treasury.  It might even help our treasury and credit rating.  I agree with Ron Paul in that going to war over Iran would be idiotic, costly and the end of of our empire. Curiously from the debates a moderate such as Romney appears to want to increase defense spending so that he can strut around like a bully in situation such as this.

The Road to Serfdom

Re-reading Hayek's book and I want to repeat a sentence and then comment.

"But while progress toward what is commonly called "positive" action was necessarily slow, and while for immediate improvement Liberalism had to rely on the gradual increase in wealth which freedom brought about it had to constantly fight proposals which threatened this progress."

1) Liberal in this book is used the way it was meant to be used about a hundred years ago, in other words one hundred and eighty degrees from what is generally understood to be liberal today.  Unfortunately many freedom loving individuals may not understand that and misconstrue what a libertarian is just for that reason. In my mind the libertarian manifesto is a few words from Jefferson's hand on the Declaration of Independence declaring "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to be everyone's right.

2) Freedom and free markets create wealth slowly and steadily. You run into trouble when you try to short cut freedom to reach artificial goals.  Needless to say our freedoms have been pretty badly cut up since FDR's administration made Washington D. C. a center of federal authority.

3) Ron Paul's life long focus on liberty has built a slow steady brick by brick fortress of a campaign much like the steady economic progress described by Hayek. It doesn't flip flop. It grows when others go out on a limb against liberty and then have to retrench and mend their ways. There is no desperate say anything necessary to get elected about the Paul campaign.  The GOP has a revolution on their hands and it looks very much like Goldwater versus Rockefeller.

Ranks of Ron Paul Volunteers

According to today's NYT front page article it appears that Ron Paul has the youth group, reminiscent of the Clean Gene supporters of Senator Gene McCarthy presidential bid in 1968. Another article in the same paper talk of how the Republican candidates are using the social media to promote their message. I don't think the regular members of the GOP understand social media.  First its tough to get your message out to the old folks if they are not online and do not know what Face Book is.  As I remarked earlier,  Ron Paul looks old but has a message that appeals to the young, who happen to be tech and media savvy.  Michele Bachman and Rick Santorum look young and attractive but they appeal to a constituency that have to pull out their ear horns and ask, "eh .. what did you say? "

Jackson the Banks

Almost sounds pornographic and of course it begs the question what it means?  Do what Andrew Jackson did,  eliminate the Second Bank of the United States or in the present circumstances the Federal Reserve  and the top ten banks into one hundred little pieces.
Now that I have the placard I need  to get the gumption to go the Wall Street demonstrations.

Wall Street Demonstrators

I would like to be a part of it, but I haven't come up with a condensed enough version of my chant: "Big Government and Wall Street are cake eaters. Bring government back to the States and break the banks into little pieces just like Andrew Jackson did.