Flailing Around In Washington

IF THINGS weren’t bad enough, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) isn’t making things any better. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is careful to post an item about the author of the banking crisis, Friend-of-Angelo Chris Dodd, every day.

On Friday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., mouthed off that the government might have to nationalize some big banks. Such a move would clean out investors, and investors reacted accordingly.

If you read the late great Michael Kelly’s essay “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks” in Things Worth Fighting For you learn that back in the 1980s Senator Chris Dodd was not reading up learned tomes on credit and banking, diligently preparing for the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee. No, he was getting roaring drunk at La Brasserie with Ted Kennedy.

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk, too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.)

I could go on, but I won’t.

What this country needs is a lot less of the political elite grabbing on the wheel of state, and a lot more power and responsibility devolved to ordinary businessmen and ordinary consumers. For over a century, the Progressives and their heirs the liberals have been “calling the big shots” on everything from banking to health care to education to welfare and the results are in. They screwed up.

America needs a system that doesn’t depend on wise men in Congress or the bureaucracy or the Treasury or the Federal Reserve. There’s a reason for that. The wise men don’t have a clue.

We need an economy that’s a lot less about debt and a lot more about equity.
We need a politics that’s a lot less about patronage and federal dollars and a lot more about setting rules for everyone to honor.
We need a culture that’s a lot less about personal creativity and a lot more about creative thinking about what we can do for other people.

The world isn’t a global village. It can’t be run by the village Big Man ordering around his deferential villagers.

The world is an organism. It runs according to ideas and notions that we hardly grasp. That’s why we need to be conservative about the powers we loose into the world, and we need to be especially careful about the powers we give to politicians.

Hey, there’s a concept. How about a greater separation of powers between the economic sector, the poliltical sector, and the moral/cultural sector! Then we could keep politicians in their place, bankers in their place, and moralists in their place.

That would at least be better than the Amateur Hour running right now in Washington DC.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

mysql close 0