From The Hill:

A group of House Republicans introduced a bill on Wednesday to rein in the various “czars” in the Obama administration.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and 28 other House Republicans introduced legislation to do away with the informal, paid advisers President Obama has employed over the past two years.

The legislation, which was introduced in the last Congress but was not allowed to advance under Democratic control, would do away with the 39 czars Obama has employed during his administration…

To me, this is just for starters – we should seek at least a 20% reduction in all Congressional and White House staff. The Czars, though, really have to go – they are nothing more, these days, than a way to put politically toxic Presidential supporters on the payroll without either civil service or Congressional oversight. To put it bluntly, we’re being forced to pay high salaries to people who couldn’t get a real job if you put a gun to their head…but, meanwhile, they get to use their sinecures to advance a far left agenda never supported by the American voters.

It is not just an economic policy – it is a world view. This is how it works, in practice – from Victor Davis Hanson:

…In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street…

Part of an excellent look at what Hanson is calling “our new sophists”, but that bit there is just too perfect in describing the sort of leadership we have. Its not that Orszag, et al didn’t believe in what they were peddling in 2009 – all their life and all their experiences taught them that massive government spending was the sure-fire cure for a down economy. The only problem with such thinking is that it wasn’t – and isn’t, and never will be – based upon reality. Keynes got it wrong – you can’t borrow and spend your way to prosperity via inflation. Such views are the creation of people who never worked at a real job, who have a great deal of wealth readily at their disposal and never spend any time just talking to the regular folks who actually make the country work.

But, they believed it – and still believe it. Its just that now its come a cropper, they don’t want to be confronted with their failure. So, they retreat to the universities and the corporate board rooms where they can continue to believe and never have any evidence come before them which questions their views. They’ll write articles and give interviews and expound their Keynesian views and retain the awed respect of their fellow sophists…people, after all, who can rationalize anything, be it unpatriotic behavior or butchering an unborn child.

Its really rather sad, when you think about it – but among the many banes of modern life is to have a class of people who don’t know, but think they do and, worse, have power to give effect to their bogus ideas. At the end of the day, our real problem is how to cut such people out of the equation – how to take these counter-productive sophists out of positions of authority.

This is both difficult and rather easy – difficult because the positions they hold allow them to make a lot of noise in defense of their views and position, but easy because almost all of them are in one way or another dependent upon government. Either in the form of direct employment or by government subsidy/regulation insulating them from real life. Cut government out from underneath them, and they’ll disappear…that is, they’ll be forced to actually do something worthwhile, and that will knock the nonsense clean out of their heads. In the end, we’d be doing them a service.

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=politics/2011/01/06/natpkg.house.reads.constitution.cnn

That is a quote from G. K. Chesterton, and I bring it up because of this bit by Veronique de Rugy:

…the truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets.

Think about it. Competition is good for consumers because it keeps prices low while increasing the quality and choices of products and services. Yet competition is hard work for businesses. They have to fight for customers by innovating and evolving in ways that consumers demand.

To avoid the gritty work of fighting it out in a free market, organized private interests…lobby the government for special regulations, preferential tax treatment and laws that keep out competition…

It is best described as “crony capitalism” – that species of capitalist activity which is really an alliance between State and Business to the detriment of the public. All too often, this is what we have in America as opposed to free markets. Liberals claim this is all conservative stuff – that this, indeed, is what we conservatives are for. Such claims are nonsense – the businesses which do engage in restraint of trade via government taxation and regulation are bi-partisan, but with a distinct bias in favor of which ever party is most willing to use the heavy club of government to regulate the market. Meaning, of course, that most of the time such businesses are allied with the Democrat party. But never let it be said that some people allegedly conservative don’t fall for this.

Every reason under the sun is brought forth, at one time or another, to justify intervention in the free market – safety concerns, however, are most often used. The dirty, little secret of such regulations, however, is that big businesses – and smaller but well-entrenched businesses – can afford the extra regulatory cost. Smaller businesses – and especially aggressive, young start-ups – are least able to carry the freight, and thus get frozen out. You think that no one in America has had an idea for a new type of car over the past 70 years? That GM, Ford and Chrysler are so good that no American can possibly challenge? Of course not – but the whole system of taxation and regulation of the auto industry makes it next to impossible that a new challenger will arise within America, and that is why we’re being blown out of the water by competition from places like Japan and Korea (and, soon, India and China, if we don’t watch out). And the big auto makers have lobbied hard to make this system what it is.

So, too, in business after business. People already well established in an industry use their money to lobby for regulations and taxes which freeze out competition. They are aided by pressure groups from unions (who also can’t survive competition, and thus attempt to forbid it), environmentalist groups (who will take a bribe from Big Corporation in a second) and various busy-body groups who only want their own axe ground and care not a bit about what happens to America, as a whole.

In order to reform our economy to return it to wealth-creation, we need to massively slash the tax and regulatory schemes which have been set in place. We’ll get screams when we do this but remember that all the shouts are from people who are doing well right now, while the rest of us are doing rather lousy. The screamers don’t care that our nation is going down the tubes – they’ve got the tax and regulatory system which keeps them fat, and that is all they care about. They are deathly afraid of one thing above all – that we’ll free up our country and allow anyone who wants to enter the market. That scares them because they know they can’t compete. They’ll be ruined; they’ll lose their place at the trough; they won’t be special and rich and privileged any more! It makes them wet their pants with fear…and so as we try to fix things, they’ll claim that we’re trying to kill granny and beat puppies to death with tire irons.

Pay no attention to them – do not, I implore you, buy for a moment the stories that everyone and everything will be ruined if we cut the business tax, eliminate some of the most onerous environmental and labor regulations and make it easier to enter the market. Once we get that free market, the stern discipline of market forces will ensure that businesses do the right thing – anyone who doesn’t will be exposed and ruined. The people who end up running business will be those who actually can do it – not, as today, just timer servers who got a leg up because they were befriended in long years past by someone else high up in the system.

There is no and will be no perfect system, my friends. Only God can provide that, and He will, but not until the End. Until that time, we can only do the best we can – and we can’t do our best if we’ve got a system which protects and rewards the incompetent while hamstringing the best and brightest.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has decided to send an additional 1,400 Marine combat forces to Afghanistan, officials said, in a surprise move ahead of the spring fighting season to try to cement tentative security gains before White House-mandated troop reductions begin in July.

The Marine battalion could start arriving on the ground as early as mid-January. The forces would mostly be deployed in the south, around Kandahar, where the U.S. has concentrated troops over the past several months…

Putting the seal on victory, or desperate attempt to salvage a surge only half done by a President who simply does not understand war? Only time will tell.

God bless our Marines and the rest of our troops in Afghanistan.

With a horrible fate – from The Hill:

House Democrats’ goal is to make Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) the Speaker of the House again, their campaign chairman said Wednesday evening.

Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), set his goal as nothing short of winning back control of the House in the 2012 elections…

Ok, Americans, its not like the Democrats haven’t warned you – they think that you didn’t get enough of Speaker Pelosi; that what America needs is even more of her style of House leadership. Do you agree? Then just vote for that Democrat in 2012…that moderate-sounding, sorta-conservative Democrat the DCCC has set up in your district; he’s not a kook like Pelosi…

…but he will put Pelosi back in as Speaker; and that is what Democrats want.

A big, old “hmmmm” on this one:

Fresh off winning reelection and proving she can raise massive amounts of campaign cash, Rep. Michele Bachmann is beginning to consider a presidential run, according to close congressional aides.

As part of that effort, the Minnesota Republican will travel to the early caucus state of Iowa on Jan. 21 to confer with state GOP leaders and address a group of conservative tax activists…

Turns out that Bachmann was born in Iowa – so, can run as a “favorite daughter” candidate there.

While hated by the left almost as much as Sarah Palin, Bachmann would bring to the table much of what Sarah Palin has (attractive, articulate, sheer guts) without having Palin’s liabilities (ie, the fact that Palin has been relentlessly slandered for two years has put a huge negative on public perception of her as a person). Bachman is a hero to the TEA Party and grassroots conservatism, would be nationally a fresh face (we political junkies know who she is, but probably not 1 in 10 unaffiliated voters could identify her) and would simply throw all Iowa calculations in to a cocked hat – making it completely unknown who would win.

Policy-wise, Bachmann is solid. Voted against the GM bailout, unreservedly pro-life, wants to repeal ObamaCare, in favor of a flat tax, solid on Israel…pretty much what any conservative would want. But, could she win?

Always a difficult task for someone as low down the political food chain as a House member. While she’s got the ability to raise vast sums, she hasn’t got the national recognition to really be credible as a candidate. She’d have to come in first or second in both Iowa and New Hampshire to really get people thinking of her. And so, she’s likely an excellent VP candidate for anyone other than Sarah Palin (just too much alike to be an effective team) – anyone, that is, who wants to court Palin’s legions of supporters.

Still, it would be fun to have her in the race – always nice for the GOP to showcase all our beautiful, courageous and hard charging women in contrast to the tired, old men and women who run the Democrat party. And, who knows?, maybe lightening could strike…

While oil prices have pulled back slightly from their recent highs, Bloomberg is reporting that a lot of experts are predicting higher oil prices in 2011 – with some going as high as $100 a barrel in their predictions. Ignored in all this is the role played by Federal Reserve money printing. The whole story is about how, allegedly, people are expecting robust economic recovery and are thus betting on increased oil usage. But the kicker to this story is that embedded in it is the proof showing that it isn’t demand causing prices to rise:

…Production will increase this year while stockpiles are already at a surplus, Evans said. Oil output will rise 0.9 percent this year, according to the Energy Department. U.S. inventories were 339.4 million barrels as of Dec. 24, 7.6 percent above the five-year seasonal norm, the department said on Dec. 30…

What can we draw out of this? First, that demand is not significantly increasing – in other words, if there is an economic recovery, it isn’t causing people to use more oil. That would be a strange economic recovery, if you ask me. Secondly, that oil traders, unless they are complete idiots, aren’t expecting tight supplies to ramp up prices – they are, therefor, expecting the further deterioration of the dollar to press oil prices higher.

Rising prices for basic necessities threatens the entire economy. But there is no way to avoid such rises – there are simply too many fake dollars out there. Bernanke has printed us in to economic ruin. The only thing remaining is for us to pay the piper for it.

On January 4th, I paid $3.09 for a gallon of gas – on January 5th, I paid $3.13.

With hat tip to IMAO for reminding me of it:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

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