Yearly Archives: 2009

Quote of the Day: “The Greeks…labored under the delusion that their democracy was a guarantee of peace and plenty, not realizing that unrestrained majority rule always destroys freedom, puts the minority at the mercy of the mob, and works at cross-purposes to the effective use of human energy and individual initiative.” — Henry Grady Weaver, “The Mainspring of Human Progress”

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Subject: Using the taxes you pay to bribe members of Congress

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It’s a crime for citizens to bribe members of Congress. But it’s perfectly legal for members of Congress to use your tax money to bribe each other. It’s called logrolling. One Congressperson says to another, “I’ll vote for your spending bill if you’ll vote for mine.”

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What else could this be called, but an attempt to use tax money to buy a legislative outcome? In a word, a bribe.

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Could we have a law to make this kind of bribery illegal, to be punished by jail-time, fines, and expulsion from office?

Quote of the Day: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” — Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) Source: The Soul of a Man Under Socialism, 1891

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Subject: Passing the “Read the Bills Act” and the “One Subject at a Time Act”

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Here’s how we plan to do it. Step One . . .

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•  Write a simple letter introducing people to RTBA and OSTA (you’ll see this letter soon)

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• Get a good volume discount by printing a large quantity of these letters

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• Mail these letters to people likely to love RTBA and OSTA

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Why letters? Because they allow us to target the most likely responders. Direct mail provides higher recruitment rates than any other form of advertising, including the Downsizer-Dispatch. These letters will ask people to . . .

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• Join DownsizeDC.org for free

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• Receive the Downsizer-Dispatch for free

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•  Use our quick and easy Educate the Powerful System to pester Congress to pass RTBA and OSTA

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Quote of the Day: “The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty.” — Patrick Cox

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Subject: The evidence is in — the stimulus package won’t work

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Congress wants to stimulate the economy by spending $30 billion on road repair and construction, but the Congressional Budget Office reports that . . .

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* Less than $4 billion would enter the economy before 2010
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If past recessions are any guide an economic recovery could begin, naturally, by the end of this year. This means that most of the spending proposed in the so-called stimulus package will come too late to serve its supposed purpose.

Downsize DC has joined 24 other organizations in the Campaign For A New Policy On Iran, calling on President Obama to open a dialog with Iran and reverse the failed policies of the past 30 years. A statement has been issued which you can read here.

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More background on U.S. relations with Iran can be found in the Joint Experts’ Statement On Iran, which can be read here.

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Quote of the Day: “All great truths began as blasphemies.” — George Bernard Shaw, Annajanska, 1919

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Subject: Mexican Civil War could spill over into U.S.

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You’re not hearing about it yet, but a civil war is raging in Mexico — between drug lords and the government. The Mexican government deployed 36,000 troops to fight this war in 2006, but the problem is getting worse. Here are the disconcerting results . . .

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* There have been more kidnappings in Mexico than Iraq! 1,000 have been officially reported, but human rights groups estimate the real number at 3,000.

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* Despite high-profile arrests but the bloodshed has doubled from 2007 to 2008, with between 5,300 and 5,700 dead in the past year from attacks related to the drug trade. 

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* The city of Ciudad Juárez ended the year with 1,600 of those deaths

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Now this violence is threatening to spill across our border!

Quotes of the Day: “Who are you who wanted only to be told what you knew before?” — Walt Whitman, from “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”

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“A very popular error: having the courage of one’s convictions; instead, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions!” — Friederich Nietzsche

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Subject: Creating a diversified portfolio of Downsize DC campaigns

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Today we want to preview and explain some coming developments in the life of Downsize DC.org. We’ll begin with a comparison . . .

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When you join a political party you’re effectively supporting everything that party stands for, even those stands with which you disagree. And when you vote for a political candidate you’re essentially voting for all the things that politician will do, even those things you loathe. Political parties and candidates are a package deal, an all or nothing proposition.

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DownsizeDC.org is different. You can either take action or not on our campaigns, depending on whether you agree or disagree. It should also be noted that . . .

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We plan to spend the bulk of our money promoting the Downsize DC Agenda, including the “Read the Bills Act” and the “One Subject at a Time Act” — things with which nearly all DC Downsizers agree. Very little of your money, if any, will ever promote things you might oppose.

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But there are a variety of issues that might attract people to our Downsize DC Army. DownsizeDC.org is very much like a store, where you can pick and choose what you will buy. We offer no package deals. Unlike political parties or candidates, we’re not

Quote of the Day: “Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.” – Albert Einstein

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Subject: Agency Madness

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Here are three recent items with something in common . . .

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#1: FDA experts have voted to ban the drugs Serevent and Foradil for asthma patients. The vote isn’t binding, but the FDA generally follows such recommendations. And yet . . .

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• One-third of these experts disagreed with banning these drugs for adult patients

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• The leading rationale was that many patients used them incorrectly by not pairing them with a steroid. But what about patients who took the drugs responsibly and correctly?

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• The total cost of these drugs plus steroids is still cheaper than that of two other asthma drugs, Advair and Symbicort, which were approved.

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In other words, the panel voted to limit the clinical options of doctors and increase the costs for patients.

Quote of the Day: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” – Rahm Emmanuel, Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff

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Subject: The politician who loves the crisis

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Rahm Emmanuel loves the financial crisis. He sees it as an opportunity. His admission of this fact, which we’ve used as our quote of the day, is breathtaking. 

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Mr. Emmanuel tried to moderate his enthusiasm for exploiting the crisis by claiming that his desire wasn’t for big government, but for good government. But has Mr. Emmanuel ever acted as if good government was consistent with smaller government? We doubt it. 

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Mr. Emmanuel isn’t alone in seeing crisis as an opportunity to make government “gooder” by making it bigger. Donald Rumsfeld famously wanted to exploit the 9-11 attack by “roping in everything,” including Iraq. And that is what they did.

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One “crisis” event was used to create another crisis. Now it’s happening again.

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Consider what this means:

Quote of the Day: “We got into this crisis because power was overly concentrated relative to knowledge. What has been going on for the past several months is more consolidation of power. This is bound to make things worse. Just as Nixon’s bureaucrats did not have the knowledge to go along with the power they took when they instituted wage and price controls, the Fed and the Treasury cannot possibly have knowledge that is proportional to the power they currently exercise in financial markets.” — Arnold Kling

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Subject: End the FED

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The stock market rises and then crashes. Housing prices soar and then plummet. The Federal Reserve causes these booms and busts by constantly expanding and contracting the supply of money and credit. 

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Credit expansion by the Federal Reserve increases the demand for producer assets and investment instruments. This causes bubbles in things like stocks and housing. When the Fed then contracts credit to avoid systemic price inflation the asset bubbles burst.

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This is the history of the Federal Reserve — booms and busts, mixed with episodes of economic stagnation and high inflation like the 1970s.

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Even before the Fed was created in 1913 government manipulation of money and credit caused repeated bubbles and contractions. One big source of this mischief was government imposed exchange ratios between gold, silver, and the U.S. dollar. When these hardwired exchange ratios didn’t match reality, problems ensued.

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It’s important to recognize that economic perfection isn’t possible. Investors will always make mistakes. But we would expect these mistakes to be randomly distributed throughout the economy, and occur at different times. What causes a bunch of investment mistakes to cluster in particular sectors at a specific time, causing systemic problems?

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Only government has the power to impose universal conditions on the economy, from the top down, causing investment mistakes to cluster, like they have in the housing market. The government can do this by

Quotes of the Day: “I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution.” — President-elect Barack Obama

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“Under my administration, the United States does not torture. We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest values and ideals. We must adhere to values as vigilantly as we protect our safety.” — President-elect Barack Obama

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“I think it is important for us to do that not only because that’s who we are, but also because it will ultimately make us safer, and will help in changing hearts and minds in our struggle against extremists.” — President-elect Barack Obama

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Subject: Obama says good things

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Yesterday’s Dispatch made the point that the managers of DownsizeDC.org are philosophically anti-partisan and anti-politician. If you haven’t read yesterday’s Dispatch, we hope you do. The points we made, and the shocking results of a scientific study we shared, are important to us. You can find it on our blog.

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In that Dispatch we asserted that we’re going to apply the same standards to the new president that we applied to President Bush. This means that we’ll not only criticize the new president when he does bad things, but also praise and support him when he does good things. To be honest, we didn’t get many chances to praise Bush.

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But today provides an opportunity to praise and support President-elect Obama.

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This week he introduced his new intelligence team. In doing so he made some very good promises and statements of principle.