Gangster Government
February 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward
For all of the liberal caterwauling about disparities in wealth, one thing I don’t understand is why no one, not even the socialist senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders in full bulging-neck-vein mode, has started channeling Huey Long and calling for a serious wealth tax. After all, even if you raise the top marginal income tax rate back up to the Krugman nirvana level of 91 percent, it won’t touch the
»
August 3, 2012 — Steven Hayward
It’s an old joke that may have originated with Milton Friedman (though Ronald Reagan liked to tell variations, too) that if the federal government took over Saudi Arabia, within a few years there’d be a shortage of sand. (Just look how well government control of water works out.) Just three days ago we noted here the epic failure of the U.S. Postal Service to avoid a long-term descent into bankruptcy
»
December 23, 2011 — Steven Hayward
There’s an old saying that goes something like “scoundrels vastly underestimate the cynical possibilities of ‘reform,’” and my own social-sciency version of this is the equation P+R=2P, where P is the Problem and R is the Reform to solve the problem, but which makes the problem twice as bad. And yes, elementary algebra shows that Reform is a Problem itself. (See how easy modern academic political science is? You think
»
November 30, 2011 — John Hinderaker
I wrote about the EPA’s “environmental justice” initiative here, here and here. The environmental justice program is based on an executive order by Bill Clinton, which was mostly ignored until Barack Obama’s EPA ran with it. The fundamental problem with “environmental justice,” apart from the fact that no one has any idea what it is, is that the EPA has no legislative authority to pursue such an agenda. Accordingly, the
»
November 13, 2011 — Steven Hayward
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that ‘There are no second acts in American lives,” but it would seem this applied chiefly to him alone for the obvious reason: Fitzgerald’s literary career peaked in his twenties, with Gatsby. There have been lots of notable second acts: Ronald Reagan’s political career, for example, or numerous actors like Leslie Nielsen, who went from being a serious dramatist to the straight-man comic. You can
»
October 4, 2011 — John Hinderaker
…a shame if anything should happen to it! The Democrats took gangster government to a new level today with attacks on Bank of America by Dick Durbin and President Obama. The attacks arise out of the Durbin Amendment to Dodd-Frank, which, as we wrote here, directed the Fed to fix the fees which banks can charge for debit card transactions. The rate set by the Fed is inadequate and will
»
September 25, 2011 — Steven Hayward
[Damn. John beat me to this story. As soon as I banged out a draft and went to post I saw that John had already worked it over. Another failure of editorial coordination here at Power Line. Should I pile on? Yeah, why not. There’s one little item in this story I can add to.] Are New York Times editorial writers complete innumerate nincompoops? Okay, silly question. The answer is
»
September 18, 2011 — Scott Johnson
Michelle Malkin fits the Obama campaign’s AttackWatch into the larger pattern set by previous incarnations of “the Obama snitch police.” In her post Michelle recalls the 2008 Obama campaign’s FightTheSmears. In the good old days it was a smear to claim that Michelle Obama ordered room service when she hadn’t stayed at the hotel! Fortunately, FightTheSmears didn’t have to respond to Andrea Tantaros’s New York Daily News column on Michelle
»
August 5, 2011 — Scott Johnson
In the post “Chrysler’s resurrection” I wrote about James Stewart’s New York Times puff piece portraying the new Chrysler as a great success story. The Obama administration’s treatment of the auto companies and ongoing deceptions regarding the financial success of the treatment deserves more attention than it has received. In the Age of Obama, the enormities accumulate so quickly it’s hard to keep up. Steven Rattner was the Obama administration’s
»
