America’s leading and most prolific intellectual necessarily and succinctly debunks the convenient Beltway mythology:

…. The idea is that it was a lack of government supervision which allowed “greed” in the private sector to lead the nation into crises that only our Beltway saviors can solve.

What utter rubbish this all is can be found by checking the record of how government regulators were precisely the ones who imposed lower mortgage lending standards.

It was members of Congress (of both parties) who pushed the regulators, the banks and the mortgage-buying giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into accepting risky mortgages, in the name of “affordable housing” and more homeownership. Presidents of both parties also jumped on the bandwagon.

Most people don’t have time to spend digging into the Congressional Record and other sources to find out the ugly truth being covered up by the blizzard of lies coming out of Washington and echoed in much of the media. But my research assistants do that for a living, and it is all presented in a book of mine titled “The Housing Boom and Bust” that has just been published.

When the housing boom was going along merrily, Rep. Barney Frank was proud to be one of those who were pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into more adventurous financial practices, in the name of “affordable housing.”

In 2003 he said:

“I believe that we, as the federal government, have probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals.”

He added:

“I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.”

In other words, when things were looking good, he was happy to acknowledge the role of the federal government in pushing the housing market in a direction it would not have taken on its own.

But, after the risky mortgage-lending practices fostered by government intervention led to massive defaults and foreclosures that caused financial institutions to collapse or be bailed out, Frank changed his tune completely.

….. Although this is the biggest housing disaster the government has ever produced, it is by no means the first. Republicans intervened in the housing markets to promote more homeownership in the 1920s, Democrats in the 1930s, and both parties after World War II. All of these interventions led to massive foreclosures.

Don’t politicians ever learn? Why should they? What they have learned all too well is how easy it is to get credit for promoting homeownership and how easy it is to escape blame for the later foreclosures and other economic disasters that follow.

Sowell is right that too many Republicans went along for the Fan and Fred ride. But that correct assertion doesn’t change the fact that the Community Reinvestment Act was an “inspiration” of Jimmy Carter and a post-Watergate Democrat-controlled Congress, or that Fan and Fred’s loosening of credit standards occurred during the Clinton Era while those two entities were run by Democratic cronies who were as corrupt as they come.

This is the last paragraph from Will’s “Tincture of Lawlessness” column on May 14 at Townhall.

Substitute “government’s” for “administration’s” in the last sentence, which I have bolded, and you have as concise a statement as you’ll ever see explaining why the market’s allocation of resources, while of course imperfect, is superior to that of a government’s.

As is, the bolded statement also would work pretty well in the short-term as a campaign slogan:

The Obama administration’s agenda of maximizing dependency involves political favoritism cloaked in the raiment of “economic planning” and “social justice” that somehow produce results superior to what markets produce when freedom allows merit to manifest itself, and incompetence to fail. The administration’s central activity — the political allocation of wealth and opportunity — is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.

It is indeed.

Noteworthy and quoteworthy, from Howie Carr of the Boston Herald, who is closer to the situation than I am (bolds are mine):

The Boston Globe is dying this weekend, one way or the other. It probably lingers on a while longer, on life support, a Terri Schiavo of journalism, but this comedy is ending the way it was destined to.

Labor is caving, management is winning. Pinch Sulzberger, it so predictably turns out, is only a liberal with other people’s money. So now the rich kids in New York do away with seniority and the “lifetime” job guarantees for their fellow silver spoons in Boston.

Sorry, comrades. The Velvet Coffin is being shoved into the crematorium. Maybe you can get a job from Barack Obama.

Here is what happens next, and I know because it’s what went down at this newspaper when the Herald almost folded back in 1982. The bean counters are going to swagger into 135 Morrissey Blvd. and take a chainsaw to that petrified forest of deadwood.

They’ll need to set up a makeshift morgue in the newsroom. Five science reporters? Whatever they do, they’re not going to be doing it anymore. The Globe “magazine” is skinnier than a CVS circular. See ya!

As for the future job prospects of the about-to-be-unemployed, I am reminded of the old New York Titans’ final AFL game in 1962. The owner, a few sheets to the wind, drifted into the locker room before kickoff and delivered a pep talk to his players:

“For most of you,” he said, “this is your last game. Most of you aren’t good enough to play anywhere else.”

I know, they can’t brag enough about their Pulitzer prizes, like they’re on the level or something. Seriously, the limousine liberals who pass the Politically Correct Pulitzers around among themselves every spring ought to rename them the Olbermanns and run the awards ceremony live on MSNBC. Truth in advertising.

….. One last thing to all my dear friends on the Boulevard.

We’re not hiring.

Carr will ensure that the Herald doesn’t ever act like it has a monopoly.

Mr. “Black by Popular Demand” makes some great points about built-in anti-mob rule features of the Constitution:

….. The founders of our nation held a deep abhorrence for democracy and majority rule. In Federalist Paper No. 10, James Madison wrote, “Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” John Adams predicted, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Our founders intended for us to have a republican form of limited government where the protection of individual God-given rights was the primary job of government.

Alert to the dangers of majoritarian tyranny, the Constitution’s framers inserted several anti-majority rules. One such rule is that election of the president is not decided by a majority vote but instead by the Electoral College. Nine states have over 50 percent of the U.S. population. If a simple majority were the rule, conceivably these nine states could determine the presidency. Fortunately, they can’t because they have only 225 Electoral College votes when 270 of the 538 total are needed. Were it not for the Electoral College, that some politicians say is antiquated and would like to do away with, presidential candidates could safely ignore the less populous states.

Part of the reason our founders created two houses of Congress was to have another obstacle to majority rule. Fifty-one senators can block the designs of 435 representatives and 49 senators. The Constitution gives the president a veto to weaken the power of 535 members of both houses of Congress. It takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress to override a presidential veto.

To change the constitution requires not a majority but a two-thirds vote of both Houses to propose an amendment, and to be enacted requires ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures.

Noon Update: This post has been revised from how it appeared earlier this morning to conform with NewsBusters’ excerpting and style standards.

________________________

As was usually the case during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the ascendancy of Dear Leader Barack Obama means that we will often have to consult the output of center-right commentators, and of course the Media Research Center and its affiliates, to cut through the establishment media’s puffery to pick up even the most basic pieces of news.

Charles Krauthammer’s column today on the results of Obama’s just-completed European Adventure is one such raw news source.

I have bolded items in the excerpt below that represent news that was either not reported or vastly under-reported by what’s left of the establishement media (there are even more examples at his full column):

In his major foreign policy address in Prague committing the United States to a world without nuclear weapons, President Obama took note of North Korea’s missile launch just hours earlier and then grandiloquently proclaimed:

“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response.”

A more fatuous presidential call to arms is hard to conceive. What “strong international response” did Obama muster to North Korea’s brazen defiance of a Chapter 7 –”binding,” as it were — U.N. resolution prohibiting such a launch?

The obligatory emergency Security Council session produced nothing. No sanctions. No resolution. Not even a statement. China and Russia professed to find no violation whatsoever. They would not even permit a U.N. statement that dared express “concern,” let alone condemnation.

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the U.N. — a fiction and a farce, respectively — what was Obama’s further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the “realism” Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

….. He wanted more NATO combat troops in Afghanistan to match the surge of 17,000 Americans. He was rudely rebuffed.

He wanted more stimulus spending from Europe. He got nothing.

From Russia, he got no help on Iran. From China, he got the blocking of any action on North Korea.

And what did he get for Guantanamo? France, pop. 64 million, will take one prisoner. One!

The bolded items have generally been reported in at best vague terms, if at all, while the media horde has almost unanimously declared Obama’s European Adventure an unqualified success. The reality is quite the opposite — The specifics Krauthammer notes make it clear that President ‘Prompter is courting danger (Obama may not think so, but history says he is) and failing to defend our interests, up to and including survival as a nation.

Although Rush is right when he points out that his popularity has generally climbed regardless of who is in office, there’s little doubt that center-right talk radio is also helping to fill in the information void the establishment media is creating, seemingly deliberately, around Dear Leader. There are also of course the center-right blogs that are around now to pick up the slack.

We shouldn’t have to work so hard just to get the basics, but like it or not, it’s the reality.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

At Townhall:

The reason why your college professor, politician or minister cannot give a simple yes or no answer to the question of whether one person should be used to serve the purposes of another is because they are sly enough to know that either answer would be troublesome for their agenda. A yes answer would put them firmly in the position of supporting some of mankind’s most horrible injustices such as slavery. After all, what is slavery but the forcible use of one person to serve the purposes of another? A no answer would put them on the spot as well because that would mean they would have to come out against taking the earnings of one American to give to another in the forms of farm and business handouts, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and thousands of similar programs that account for more than two-thirds of the federal budget. There is neither moral justification nor constitutional authority for what amounts to legalized theft. This is not an argument against paying taxes. We all have a moral obligation to pay our share of the constitutionally mandated and enumerated functions of the federal government.

Unfortunately, there is no way out of our immoral quagmire. The reason is that now that the U.S. Congress has established the principle that one American has a right to live at the expense of another American, it no longer pays to be moral. People who choose to be moral and refuse congressional handouts will find themselves losers. They’ll be paying higher and higher taxes to support increasing numbers of those paying lower and lower taxes. As it stands now, close to 50 percent of income earners have no federal income tax liability and as such, what do they care about rising income taxes? In other words, once legalized theft begins, it becomes too costly to remain moral and self-sufficient. You might as well join in the looting, including the current looting in the name of stimulating the economy.

I’m not quite as pessimistic as the good professor is, but there is much momentum to be stopped, and much that must be undone.

Properly understood, free-market capitalism works. Free-market capitalism has always worked when allowed to work. Free-market capitalism will work again, if we let it, but US and world leadership seem tragically bound and determined to thwart it.

Mark Levin read this powerful column by Don Boudreaux at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the air last night. It deserved the full airing it received.

Boudreaux brilliantly brings in historical context:

Imagine traveling back in time to 1809. You describe to some people you befriend the reality of personal transportation in America in 2009. You describe the automobile.

In your own mind, of course, you’re describing an ordinary contrivance that makes possible experiences that are perfectly ordinary to denizens of the early 21st century, such as zooming along at 70 mph. But to your early 19th-century listeners, you’re describing a barely imaginable wonder.

“What?!” they ask. “People in the future will drive machines made out of metal and filled with highly flammable liquids? Surely that will be intolerably dangerous. And to what purpose? No one has any need to travel at such unheard-of speeds!

….. I suspect that your friends in 1809 would not believe your account. And what I suspect they would find most unbelievable is not the progress of technology that automobiles require. Rather, what would be most difficult to comprehend is the fact that such an amazingly complex development and coordination of economic activities can occur without being consciously arranged. After all, it’s not just that people in 2009 can easily afford automobiles, but also that whole industries exist to support automobile driving.

Oil exploration and refining, tire manufacturing, steel production, auto-parts making and retailing, automobile insuring, road-building — these are only some of the many industries whose existence is promoted by, and whose existence promotes, automobile manufacturing. Yet no one designed, or even foresaw, this outcome. No one designed how all the many industries’ efforts are coordinated with each other. This outcome evolved into its modern-day pattern through billions upon billions of individual decisions, some bigger than others, but none larger than a tiny part of the total number of decisions that combined with each other to make automobile driving an unremarkable reality in the early 21st century.

Stupendous coordination of millions of individual plans and talents emerged spontaneously — and not only in the automobile industry. The entire economy is a testament to such spontaneous coordination.

The single greatest fact about capitalist society is that the great bulk of it appears to be the handiwork of a master designer but, in fact, is unplanned and even unimaginable before it becomes real and familiar.

Remember this lesson whenever you hear alleged “experts” insisting that only conscious effort by government to “stimulate” demand can save the economy from its current downturn.

Of course, read the whole thing.

Allow me to expand on the paragraph I bolded, and to disagree with Boudreaux on one point.

There is “handiwork of a master designer” involved. That designer is God.

The lack of belief that what has been proven to work before — what Boudreaux calls “spontaneous coordination” — won’t work again is rooted in a fundamental lack of belief in God, that the Master Designer will either fail us this time, or that He doesn’t exist in the first place.

Instead, the active and unprecedented (in the US) attempts to prevent the spontaneous coordination Boudreaux referred to from occurring reflect a fundamental belief that the self-appointed elites among us are gods — that somehow, the “best and the brightest” can manage the billions and billions of interactions and decisions involved in commerce and, ultimately, individual lives better than individuals can themselves. They can’t. It is utter folly to believe they can.

Sometimes, when the elites fail, as they always have, they get mad. Occasionally they get vengeful when they see that they can’t control things to their liking, or that those they attempt to control don’t buy into their supposedly self-evident wisdom; the tens of millions killed by the Soviet Union and Communist China in the 20th Century are a testament to that.

Those of us who have a belief in God know that, as long as the people in a society are guided by His moral and ethical principles (whether we as a nation remain that way is a subject for another time), His handiwork, working through us, will:

• Show us, as is now happening before our eyes, how to conquer disease and illness without resorting to murder.
• Prove that human progress is not a recipe for planetary destruction.
• Over time, raise up the poorest among without resorting to outright theft from those who have.

Properly understood and carried out, free-market capitalism is faith-based free-market capitalism.

Faith-based free-market capitalism works. Faith-based free-market capitalism has always worked when allowed to work. Faith-based free-market capitalism will work again, if we let it, but US and world leadership seem tragically bound and determined to thwart it.

The George Mason econ guru is outstanding, as usual, in his March 4 column:

Government health care advocates used to sing the praises of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). That’s until its poor delivery of health care services became known. A recent study by David Green and Laura Casper, “Delay, Denial and Dilution,” written for the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs, concludes that the NHS health care services are just about the worst in the developed world. The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care.

….. Government health care advocates sing the praises of Canada’s single-payer system. ….. (But) Canadians have an option Britainers don’t: close proximity of American hospitals. In fact, the Canadian government spends over $1 billion each year for Canadians to receive medical treatment in our country. I wonder how much money the U.S. government spends for Americans to be treated in Canada.

“OK, Williams,” you say, “Sweden is the world’s socialist wonder.”

….. Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden’s National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.

Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation. He said, “In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views. New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem (that brings) increased costs and disturbances in today’s slimmed-down health care.”

….. I wonder how many Americans would like a system that would ….. prohibit private purchase of your own medicine if the government refused paying. ….. Government health care advocates might say that they will avoid the horrors of other government-run systems. Don’t believe them.

Read the whole thing.

Team Obama won’t tell us how they will avoid the horrors just described, as well as many others (if not in the first few years, eventually) — because they can’t.

At Townhall, another well-known commentator calls out the nature of Obama’s agenda, and explains the markets’ decline:

But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What’s going on? “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions — the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic — for enacting his “Big Bang” agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy — worthy and weighty as they may be — are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

Some of us warned that this is what was really going on.

Nobody with a brain can make a case that this is what America consciously and deliberately voted for in November.