Free Market Delusions

It's not surprising, but nonetheless infuriating, to see self-serving columnists flogging capitalist mythology while the economy slowly sinks millions of Americans--and that's before the current meltdown, and all we had was rising income disparity and millions of uninsured Americans going broke because of growing health costs.

Forbes columnists Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, who are also investment advisers, today try to make the case that history proves that economies inevitably recover from recessions (and even depressions) without government intervention--what they term "catalysts."

After making unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the business cycle and bloodless remarks about corporate efficiency and new "skill sets" learned by labor, they conclude by lauding the invisible (and heretofore unseen and unproven) hand of the market:

As long as human beings attempt to better themselves and improve standards of living, and as long as policymakers don't compound problems, the natural course of growth will return in its magical and mysterious way.

In other words, Trust us, growth will return. Just don't raise our taxes or increase our regulatory requirements, because that would be intolerable.

Never mind that new regulations are shown to stimulate innovation because they force companies to adopt new technologies and processes rather than simply trying to guard their hoard.

Covering War or Glorifying It?

A new piece on CNN correspondent Michael Ware in Men's Journal makes the journalist seem compelling--and there's no doubting his bravery or his commitment to his profession.

The piece, CNN's Prisoner of War, shows how hard it is for Ware to get the war out of his head--or even for Ware to drag himself out of the zone of conflict.

It's easy to sympathize with Ware, and Greg Veis, who wrote this piece, tells us a lot about our foreign policy blunders--including the nugget that we may be essentially giving Iraq over to the Iranians.

But Veis also lets Ware get away with a common conceit, which is that war experience is somehow more valuable or "real" than other types of experience.

“Do you want to get to the nub of life?” Ware asked me. “To strip away the bullshit? Life is so distilled down in war — that’s an obvious statement — but to be able to see it with your own eyes and be able to discover that which lies within yourself, I don’t know, it’s more than life changing.

But the real bullshit is when we let ourselves believe that our experience is the only true and unvarnished one. I've had similar experiences and suffered similar delusions--"man, you don't understand life the way I do because you haven't seen..." name it.

Every experience is a real experience, every life is a real life. Ware might argue that the daily confrontation with death is what makes war real, but we all confront death every day.

What is worth saying is that our lives afford us the opportunity to ignore the fact that we confront death on a daily basis, and that we have committed a great injustice by forcing the Iraqi people to confront death whether they want to or not.

Do Democrats Know They're in the Majority?

It's all well and good for Arlen Spector to rattle his saber and threaten to hold up Eric Holder's confirmation as Attorney General.

And if Republican senators want to block legislation supporting the bail-out of the auto industry, and if they can get away with it, well that's their prerogative.

But what's puzzling me is that the Democrats don't seem to realize that they hold all the power in Washington, D.C.

Let me say that again.

Democrats hold all the power in Washington, D.C.

Now they just have to act like they know it.

I voted for Barack Obama because, among other reasons, I want a change in tone in American politics, and I want someone who can convince Americans that progressive politics is good for them.

But I vote Democratic because I believe in progressive policies. I want Congressional Democrats to push for those policies, and I want them to use their committee chairmanships and other powers to enact those policies and programs.

Republicans know how to work the system so well, they behave like don't have to face the consequences of massive electoral defeats over the past two cycles.

It's time for Democratic lawmakers to show them where they really stand.

GM Part of the Military-Industrial Complex

Gen. Wesley Clark argues that the U.S. automobile industry should be rescued by a bail-out plan because car and truck makers are an indispensable part of the military's procurement process.

Citing recent history in Iraq to bolster his claim that the U.S. military benefits from having a vibrant domestic auto industry, Clark writes:

In a little more than a year, the Army has procured and fielded in Iraq more than a thousand so-called mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles. The lives of hundreds of soldiers and marines have been saved, and their tasks made more achievable, by the efforts of the American automotive industry.

But this argument implies that if GM, Ford and Chrysler are allowed to go under, there won't be any U.S.-based automotive plants from which the U.S. military could procure vehicles like the Hummer.

If the Big Three do in fact go under, however, their plants won't simply lie fallow. U.S. consumers will still need to buy new cars every so often, and existing Toyota, Honda and Hyundai plants won't be able to keep up with that demand.

So Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai will buy their defunct plants for pennies on the dollar, re-tool them to fit their more efficient standards, and use them to meet demand they otherwise couldn't meet.

In other words, the foreign car makers will become domestic manufacturers for all intents and purposes--and that includes supplying the U.S. military.

Not all, but many suppliers making up Detroit's supply chain will get business with the new Big Three, who will also employ many--although again, probably not all--auto workers.

It may be in our long-term interests to rescue domestic car-makers, but jingoism and dubious national-security claims don't make the case.

Barack Keeping Clear of Lieberman Squabble

Democrats may or may not have the knives out for Joe Lieberman. Bill Clinton may or may not be making calls on Traitor Joe's behalf.

But one thing is clear. Barack Obama isn't going to soil his hands with this muck, and he shouldn't.

Earlier this week, the Obama camp said he was leaving Lieberman's status (in or out of the caucus, with or without a chairmanship) up to Senate Democrats.

And TPM today reports that an Obama spokesperson, Stephanie Cutter, says the president-elect's transition team isn't going to "referee" the issue of whether or not Lieberman gets to keep his homeland security committee chair.

That makes perfect sense. But what follows is harder to swallow for those of us who can't forget Traitor Joe's behavior on the campaign trail:

"President-elect Obama looks forward to working with anyone to move the country forward," Cutter continued. "We'd be happy to have Sen. Lieberman caucus with the Democrats. We don't hold any grudges."

To many, it sounds like, on balance, Obama would like things to stay as they are. Greg Sargent at TPM says the statement will take any steam out of the effort to dislodge Traitor Joe.

And that could spell disaster, according to folks who believe Lieberman will use the investigative powers of his committee to attack and harass the Obama Administration.

That may be--I can't pretend to read into Traitor Joe's heart--but I can't see why he would do that. He faces the prospect of re-election 2010, and even joining the GOP won't help him in the Blue state of Connecticut.

Regardless, Obama needs to continue to keep his distance. If Reid yanks Lieberman's gavel, great. If not, a great series of misdeeds will go unpunished.

Either way, though, Obama only gains by remaining above an intra-party squabble that is irrelevant to most voters. Americans elected Barack Obama to solve the country's problems, not to weigh in on politics as usual.

Obama's To-Do List Growing

Barack Obama's visit to the White House yesterday seemed more like the opening salvo in a negotiation than a simple courtesy visit. President Bush may have been the one who extended the invitation, but president-elect Obama is the one with a relevant agenda.

Sure, Bush plans to issue executive directives and maybe make a few recess appointments to the federal bench during his remaining nine weeks in office. But Obama will make those irrelevant on January 21 by reversing all of them.

And none of them will address the economic crisis, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, global warming, or our energy policy. Aside from reveling in being a "war-time president," the man once known as Shrub has shown little interest in anything of substance over the past 8 years. Why should he start now?

Meanwhile, Obama is hard at work. Careful to issue the obligatory "there's only one president at a time" homily (and while he truly has no power but the 360 electoral votes and the overwhelming popular mandate he amassed), Obama has begun to carefully push certain issues on his agenda.

First on the list is to help the auto makers before they collapse into a giant heap of scrap. The New York Times reports that during their meeting yesterday, he asked Bush to support emergency aid to the auto industry.

The Times says Bush is ideologically opposed to government intervention (with a notable exception for financial services), but that's giving Shrub too much credit. Bush is a lazy president--both intellectually and in action--and simply can't be bothered.

There may not be anything Obama can do overtly to get the automobile industry the help they need before January 20, but he's clearly sending them a signal that, to quote the 2004-vintage John Kerry, "help is on the way."

The Obama camp also revealed that the incoming president will slash government waste--by hiring more government workers.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but in fact the federal government has wasted billions of dollars because there is little or no oversight on contractors. In defense spending alone, cost overruns jumped from $42 billion in 2000 to $295 billion in 2007, according to the GAO.

On yet another front, Obama advisors are hinting that it will be more tolerant of larger mergers than would be expected from a Democratic administration. No less than Democratic lawyer David Boies, who tried Microsoft on behalf of the Clinton Administration, told the Times, "Antitrust theory is theoretical. Losing jobs and plants is real.”

This policy will be unpopular with much of the new president's constituency, but Obama clearly sees it as a necessary short-term solution to the economic crisis.

As will become apparent not only to his detractors, but to his partisans as well, President Obama will govern pragmatically, not ideologically. This might disappoint supporters like me at times, but I'll try to keep in mind that this was why I voted for him in the primaries as well as the general election: the time of rigid idealogy is past, the era of pragmatic progressivism is upon us.

Risk and Reward For the Common Weal

Venture capitalist Venky Harinarayan makes the point that the complex financial instruments that contributed to our current economic distress were truly bad for business.

In the good old days (the 1990s), Wall Street took a lot of risk on fledgling companies with good ideas--like Amazon.com and eBay. The odds that they would succeed were very small, but investing in them was the only way to make a real killing on Wall Street.

Then two things happened to dampen investors' appetite for start-ups. One was the bursting the tech bubble, which caused investors to say, "gee, not every investment is a sure thing."

The other change was that banks started creating financial instruments like CDOs (collatoralized debt obligations) that offered substantial returns for seemingly less risk than, say, your typical tech start-up. The result?

Since 2002, there have been just 351 IPOs out of 19,300 VC-backed companies--fewer than one in 50... Just two years in the late 1990s, namely 1996 and 1997, saw more IPOs than the last eight years (2001 to 2008) combined. The ratio of mergers and acquisitions to IPOs has gone from roughly 1:1 from 1996 to 2000 to 6:1 during 2001 through 2008.

Maybe now that investors have been burned more severely by the lure of easy money, they'll look for investments that actually create value instead of shuffling it around.

And that turn of events will help new companies emerge, create jobs, and contribute taxes to our common weal.

Obama Web Strength Poses Ethical Dilemma

It's already clear that a President Obama plans to use the Web to further his goals, as well he should. But he should take care not to mix politics with governance--an ethical lapse which could undermine his considerable moral authority.

Obama has a network of over 10 million supports to tap into, and that could easily be turned into avalanches of emails to recalcitrant members of Congress unwilling to do the president's bidding.

The campaign-turned-administration is also likely to use search and display ads to influence public opinion on critical new initiatives. The Washington Post notes:

The White House could "geo-target" ads so they appear online in congressional districts where members remain undecided. Obama could use Internet ads to solicit signatures for petitions, or he could place display and video ads contextually -- so they would appear on the screen next to news coverage of his proposals.

The one thing the White House will have to take care of is the appearance of using government funds for something like an Obama re-election campaign. The transition team will have to clarify who owns the list, how it can be used, and under what conditions, in order to avoid charges that it is mixing governance with politics.

It's fine (and smart) for the administration to use this list to generate support for the president's policies, but not okay for the White House to use it to help elect allies in Congress in 2010 or to further the president's own re-election bid.

It might seem like hair-splitting, but the Obama campaign might want to consider selling its list to its own transition team, and then letting the two lists grow separately from January 20, 2009 onwards.

Older Cell Phone Voters Are Reality-Based

Older cell-phone-only-voters broke more dramatically for Obama than younger ones, turning one assumption on its head.

According to the AP's Mike Mokrzycki, cell-phone only-voters in the 18-29 age bracket broke only slightly more for Obama than for McCain, with just a five-point difference in Obama's margin of victory in that age bracket. But:

the national exit poll Tuesday - which asked the phone-usage question among nearly 7,500 voters - found the starkest difference in vote preference was among voters age 30-39:

Obama took that bracket by 63-36 among cell-only voters, compared with just a 51-47 edge among voters with landlines, or 12 points better.

I think this makes a lot of sense.

Younger voters are a lot more like their older compatriots than we'd like to believe, and the five-point margin attests to that. The cell-phone only generation isn't much different than late boomers who had touch-tone only phones in their homes--nothing could have been more natural. They grew up with cell phones in their waist bands, and had to make an affirmative choice to add a landline.

The older bracket, however, had to make a conscious decision to get rid of their landlines. They had to look at the facts (they don't really need a land-line so long as they keep their batteries charged, and the likelihood that some kind of emergency will arise that would make a landline preferable to a cell is remote).

They applied the same logic to their presidential choices: one guy who was making sense versus another one who wasn't. One guy who seemed to be relying on rational thought versus the heir to the mantle (or mangle) of faith-based policy-making.

What I'm saying is that those slightly older cell-phone-only voters displayed a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to their life choices, and that was reflected in who they voted for. They picked not just the guy who was making the most sense, but the guy who seemed to be thinking things through.

Nuts or Not?

The question is this: will Harry Reid (and the Democratic leadership) have the nuts to do the right thing and yank Joe Lieberman's gavel away from him?

According to TPM, Reid seems to be wavering on this--too.

Since winning control of both houses of Congress in 2006, the Dems have shown all the backbone of a squid. Either they don't really believe in the philosophy that got them to this point, or they're so shell-shocked from decades of Republican abuse that it hasn't sunk in: they're in charge now.

Of course, their worst fears might be realized, and voters will punish them for standing up to Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Telco, for raising the minimum wage and enforcing regulations protecting the environment and Constitutional provisions for the rule of law.

It could happen, but if it does, at least they will have gone out on their own terms.

And again: haven't they gotten the message yet? They won. By a lot. Because voters want to see what they've got. So far, they haven't shown much. Let's see how they do now that they've taken the ultimate bully pulpit. And they can start by showing Joe Lieberman what they think of him, and seeing what he does about it.

Changeology 101

Barack Obama got his Presidency-in-Anticipation (what it's called when everyone clearly wants him to take the oath of office immediately) off to a great start with his president-elect Web site. It includes a lot of features that he included in his campaign site, including the ability to share your vision and share your story.

But best of all, and what bodes well for the future, there's a page for submitting ideas.

Obama seems to really believe that this is our government, and he's encouraging us to help formulate policy.

That's what I call change.