Crisis Management
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Rahm Emanuel, Nov 2008.
Like Machiavelli in “The Prince” (published in 1532) none of this is anything new, but it’s rare that someone actually says it out loud. Government creates, sustains, and basically exaggerates problems in order to implement their desired solution. i.e. To pass their particular political agenda.
Obama did it immediately after taking office, exploiting the economic crisis to pass his “recovery” plan to funnel tax dollars to his constituents. He did it again early this year to pass health care “reform”, and he’s attempting to do it today with the oil spill – using it to advance his carbon “cap and trade” and “alternative energy” agenda.
BTW – This isn’t just me bashing Obama, ALL governments do it. Obama isn’t even particularly good at it. GWB was the master.
Bush II was adept at exploiting the crisis du jour. Is there any doubt that Bush took advantage of 9/11 in order to finish off the Hussein/Bush Family Feud once and for all? There was never the slightest connection between Saddam and 9/11, but Bush – along with his lackey Colin Powell – did their best to scare the crap out of everyone to make them think Saddam was Hitler II.
How about the way Bush used 9/11 to implement his version of security – which is way closer to Hitler’s Gestapo and SS than Saddam ever dreamed of doing – called the USA PATRIOT Act?
I swear I’m not making this up – it’s official name is the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001″. Everyone knows it as the Patriot Act, and it’s has done more to strip fundamental rights rights away from Americans than anything that Bin Laden or Saddam could ever dream of doing.
Basically every single article of it that’s made it to the Supreme Court has been ruled unconstitutional. Eventually, the whole thing will be thrown out, but that takes years of court battles – and someone with the balls (and money) to challenge the law – instead of meekly doing whatever the Gestapo tell them what they are allowed to do.
Bush also used 9/11 to implement the gigantic, overblown, over-funded, mismanaged, best-example-of-big-government-gone-awry-since-LBJ’s-Great-Society, stupidity-enshrined-in-law-monstrosity-that-we-call-the “Department of Homeland Security”.
I mean really, WTF are we all doing standing in lines at airports so federal agents can be voyeurs to enable them to find and take away those fingernail files and 3.6oz tubes of toothpaste that we’re going to use to take over the plane and crash it into the Podunk State Fair?
And then there’s the $700 billion bailout of the banks (aka TARP) that Bush pushed through as he was leaving office. I could write hundreds of pages about the stupidity and ultimate uselessness of that alone.
And please don’t forget one of the most obnoxious and intrusive laws ever imposed on Americans – the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. SOX was passed in response to the Enron fiasco. AFTER Enron had already collapsed. The free market, on it’s own, without government doing a damn thing, had already corrected the problems with Arthur Andersen and other accounting firms cooking the books and basically making up numbers. The bad companies disappeared and their stockholders lost money – precisely what should have happened. No additional regulation required.
SOX reporting requirements have sucked hundreds of billions – if not trillions – from companies over the past decade. How many millions of productive workers could have – would have – been employed with that money instead?
I gotta give credit where credit is due though – Bush II (or King George II, whichever moniker you prefer) was even able to take something which was a “good thing” and turn it into a crisis. He inherited surpluses (they were fake, but no need to get into that here) “as far as the eye can see” into the future, and turned them into the largest deficits ever known in the history of man.
He did this by convincing people that the “surpluses” were simply the government taking away their hard earned wealth and squandering it. Seriously. Look up his acceptance speech when he won the nomination. He said “Some say that growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend. But they’ve got it backwards. The surplus is not the government’s money; the surplus is the people’s money.”
In the first place, there was no surplus, but more importantly, IF there had been a surplus, it should have been used to pay down the existing debt. Bush seriously thought he could cut taxes AND increase spending AND pay down the debt AND everything would be just fine. He was – and is – a world class moron.
Instead of paying down the (approximately) $5.6 trillion in debt he inherited, Bush II fricking doubled it during his term. In just 8 years, Bush II increased our debt as much as ALL PREVIOUS PRESIDENTS COMBINED!
This is so hard to comprehend that I’ll try saying it another way. During the first 212 years (from 1789 until 2001) that the US had been in existence, we accumulated about $5.6 trillion in debt. Total. The first 42 US Presidents combined spent a total of $5.6 trillion more than they collected via taxes. Got it?
Now Bush II becomes President. Starting with $5.6 trillion in debt. With his budget for 2009, he left us over $11 trillion in debt. I can spend money, but DAMN, that boy was good! Even a drunken sailor has to stop when he runs out of money. Bush didn’t.
Can you tell that I think Bush II was (and still is) the Worst. President. Ever? He even beats Carter who previously held that title in my opinion. (Hmmm… I may have to rethink this. Carter couldn’t even successfully exploit the numerous crisis he had (oil embargo, Iranian Hostage, giant swamp rabbit, etc), so it’s conceivable that he was even dumber than Bush…. I need to ponder this at length sometime.)
Anyway, Obama isn’t doing anything that previous Presidents haven’t done as well, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Just because your predecessor sucked, and you happen to (in the immortal words of a team member) “suck less” doesn’t mean I like it. It doesn’t mean I think you’re doing a good job either.
Just because I think Obama “sucks less” than Bush II doesn’t mean I agree with his policies. As with Bush II, I can name a dozen areas where I disagree with Obama. And Obama obviously learned from Bush – he isn’t going to to let a crisis go to waste. Betcha thought I’d never get back to that point, but I did. 
So he’s going to use the Gulf Oil Spill crisis to impose restrictions on drilling, and oil companies, and to impose new taxes to “punish” those responsible, and whatever else he thinks he can get away with to advance his agenda.
While I totally support “alternative energy” I do not agree with his agenda. I am a HUGE proponent of wind and solar power, and I would cover my south facing roof with solar panels and put a wind turbine in my backyard tomorrow morning – IF it made economic sense to do so. It does not.
The ONLY way it could possibly make economic sense (to individuals like me) at this point in time would be to tax the hell out of traditional power sources. Which is stupid. If I actually need to explain WHY that would be stupid, then you are too stupid to understand it.
Seriously. Read a Econ 101 textbook (or better yet, read Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson” (http://jim.com/econ/chap01p1.html) particularly “The Lesson Applied”) then ask me to explain it if you still don’t get it.
When alternative energy sources become economically viable – either by the price of them dropping or by the price of traditional sources rising via free market forces – I won’t be the only one buying and using them. Everyone will want a “cheap energy thingy” in/on their house. And they’ll have one.
Just as petroleum based kerosene displaced whale oil as fuel for lights, and gasoline beat out electric and steam powered automobiles in the early 1900’s, when “alternative” energy costs drop below the cost of fossil fuels, everyone will use it. No government interference, regulation, increased taxes, “cap and trade”, or whatever else they what to call it is required to make that happen.
Leave the market alone (no subsidies for anyone – oil companies or ethanol producers or corn growers or solar panel factories or wind turbine generator manufacturer’s or biomass methane producers or hydro wave action scheme of the day, etc.) and everyone will do what makes cents (I know it’s a bad pun, but I’m bored) for them to do.
That’s what a free market does best. No government policy can change that. And crisis management – or management by crisis – will have no lasting effect. Unfortunately, we’re not doing that.
I read somewhere that “you can sway 1000 people by emotion faster than you can convince one with logic” – or words to that effect. The problem is that those thousand people can be “swayed” back to the opposite viewpoint the next day by a new demagogue. The one who you convinced with logic will stay convinced.
Hopefully, I’ve given enough examples, and used enough logic to convince the 2 people who actually read through this rant that they shouldn’t blindly agree with the proposed solution(s) to the crisis du jour.
Please think about it. Think it through. Think about the implications of the new policy. Not simply what it means today, or what feels good, or makes you feel better because you (or your proxy the government) are sticking it to “the man”, but what the new policy will actually accomplish.
There, I feel better.
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