The Administration and Congressional Democrats demonized health insurers to help pass their healthcare reform agenda. They then demonized Wall Street to help pass their financial reform agenda. These “whipping boy” strategies had a common goal: substantial expansion of federal government control over the private sector.
The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill vastly expands federal power over financial institutions and beyond, leaving most of the substantive details to be worked out by administrative agencies. The byzantine bill evades most of the underlying causes of the financial crisis. Its creation of a vast new federal consumer protection agency bears little relation to those causes. It’s a bad bill at a bad time for the economy. It will hinder rather than enhance economic growth. It will hurt Main Street without preventing future crises. Unintended consequences will abound.
The bill’s namesakes procrastinated while Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the housing bubble grew rapidly. Their bill does not touch Fannie or Freddie. But it rewards the Federal Reserve with significantly expanded regulatory power, despite the Fed’s monetary and regulatory failures that played significant roles in creating the housing bubble.
BP should bear full responsibility for the Gulf oil spill according to the rule of law. It is entitled to due process. The politics surrounding the $20 billion dollar fund and the latest Congressional show trial are an embarrassment.
If the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats had not blown hundreds of billions of dollars in the 2009 “stimulus” bill, perhaps we could have provided the Gulf regions with several times $20 billion in immediate and special disaster relief (with recourse against BP according to the rule of law).
The just-released Nuclear Posture Review Report contains the following:
Pursuing the recommendations of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review will strengthen the security of the United States and its allies and partners and bring us significant steps closer to the President’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons.
The conditions that would ultimately permit the United States and others to give up their nuclear weapons without risking greater international instability and insecurity are very demanding. Among those conditions are success in halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, much greater transparency into the programs and capabilities of key countries of concern, verification methods and technologies capable of detecting violations of disarmament obligations, enforcement measures strong and credible enough to deter such violations, and ultimately the resolution of regional disputes that can motivate rival states to acquire and maintain nuclear weapons. Clearly, such conditions do not exist today.
But we can – and must – work actively to create those conditions.
These statements and the philosophy they would appear to represent are dangerously naive and utopian. Nuclear weapons have very likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives by deterring large-scale conventional wars among the major powers (in addition to the American and Japanese lives saved by ending the war). Without the nuclear deterrent, Western Europe would have come under Soviet domination. Israel would have ceased to exist. The collapse of the Soviet Union very likely would not have occurred. China would have overrun South Korea and Taiwan and probably have remained totalitarian.
One only hopes that the Obama administration does not really believe its own rhetoric and has a better understanding of history and the way the world works than suggested by this report.