Eric O’Keefe

“Pessimism has its advantages. You are usually right; and when you are wrong you can be delighted.”

So said George Will in a speech to the Ronald Reagan dinner at the Defending the American Dream Summit hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

Will delivered a profound assessment of the current political and financial plight of America. He identified the core problem as cultural — an entitlement mentality that has spread throughout the land, where “the benefits of consumption have been separated from the pain of saving.” He cited the U.S. savings rate, which averaged ten percent in the 1980’s, five percent in the 1990’s, and went negative in 2005. This shift from saving toward borrowing took household debt from 50 percent of GDP in 1980 to 100 percent of GDP last year.

Where did so many Americans get the idea they could borrow their way to prosperity? Will says they learned it from the federal government. When you can’t afford what you want with today’s earnings, just borrow and buy.

Will closed on an optimistic note, because he said there remains a fundamentally conservative core among the American people; it will be tapped to recover from the current crisis.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been essentially taken over by the federal government. This is a major step in the most expensive financial scandal in U.S history. These two mortgage giants guarantee $5.5 trillion of debt. They fueled the recent housing boom riding an implied federal guarantee of their debt. They used creative leverage which ballooned their phantom profits, their management bonuses, and the ultimate losses to U.S. taxpayers — which I predict will exceed $100 billion.

These organizations were classic rent-seeking companies; Fannie has a large headquarters on Wisconsin Ave. in Washington, D.C., because the source of their power and profits was Congress, not customers. They hired people for their political pull, not their financial acumen. And what we got was government-style extravagance, self-dealing, and ultimately a doubling of the publicly held debt of the United States.

This is a stunning financial development, and it should become a stunning political development. Of course Fannie paid the politically powerful from both parties, but they put their biggest dollars and biggest hires on the side of the biggest spenders.

Here is how much some of the winners profited from this scandalous operation, according to an insightful Wall Street Journal editorial:

Franklin Raines, CEO: $90,128,761 (1998-2003)

Jamie Gorelick, vice-chair: $26,466,834 (1998-2003)

Jim Johnson, CEO: $21,000,000 (1998 alone)

Who are these people? Let’s ask wikipedia:

Franklin Delano Raines (born January 14, 1949 in Seattle, Washington) is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae who served as White House budget director under President Bill Clinton.

Jamie S. Gorelick (born May 6, 1950) is an American attorney and judicial officer who was Deputy Attorney General of the United States during the Clinton administration. She was appointed by former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle to serve as a commissioner on the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which sought to investigate the circumstances leading up to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

James A. Johnson is a United States Democratic Party political figure. He was the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s failed 1984 presidential bid and chaired the vice presidential selection process for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. In the 2008 election, he is a member of the vice-presidential selection process for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama.

And Raines was a donor to Obama’s 2006 Senate campaign.

Notice a pattern?

Today’s London Times has a story on Palin wikipedia developments.

Here is the best of the story from the London Times:

Wikipedia has become another important internet tool in presenting politicians to voters. Few would be surprised if a campaign worker had been given the task of putting positive spin on Mrs Palin’s entry in preparation for last week’s announcement. A tracking site estimated that the page was viewed more than 2 million times on Friday.

Since the announcement the Sarah Palin page has been edited many hundreds of times more and Wikipedia has now put in place a partial block so that only established editors can change the entry. Some of Young Trigg’s entries have been amended or toned down.

The New York Times reports on the wiki wars:

The daily page view totals for even well-known candidates are striking. For example, according to a site that tracks the traffic to Wikipedia, the John McCain article had 645,000 page views in June. That month, Barack Obama had 1.35 million page views. Henrik Abelsson, who tracks the traffic, said that on Friday there were 2.4 million page views for Gov. Palin’s Wikipedia article.

Last year, a graduate student, Virgil Griffith, created a clever Web site, Wiki- Scanner, that made it easy to detect where anonymous editors of Wikipedia were accessing the site. In the process, companies, government agencies and, yes, politicians were caught in the act of spiffing up their Wikipedia entries, even as many assumed that anonymity would make them safe. (Wikipedia, incredibly and mercilessly, keeps a record of every change made to every article.)

Taxpayers led by Leon Drolet and Rose Bogaert are fighting to save Michigan from profligate politicians who responded to a declining economy by slamming taxpayers with a record tax hike.

Monday’s Detroit New editorialized that their effort to recall Speaker of the House Andy Dillon “serves no useful purpose.” They also reported that the recall campaign is “working against efforts to create a more cooperative environment in the Legislature.”

Let’s see — isn’t that the Legislature which last year “cooperated” to impose a record tax hike on the long-suffering taxpayers of Michigan?

The editorial was entertaining for revealing how uncomfortable the ruling clique is when taxpayers take the offensive.  King George didn’t like it either.

Leon’s rebuttal is far more readable than the editorial — and the News does not deserve a link, but if you must you can find Leon’s response and News link on the blog for the Michigan Taxpayers Alliance.

Below is a critique applicable to climate change alarmists:

These supposedly scientific assertions are, of course, accepted only because they satisfy certain moral passions.

And:

Any criticism of its scientific part is rebutted by the moral passions behind it, while any moral objections to it are coldly brushed aside by invoking the inexorable verdict of its scientific findings.

Those lines were published in 1958. Michael Polanyi was analyzing the Marxist ideology that had done so much damage to civilization. (Personal Knowledge, p. 230)

Where have all the Marxists gone? As the Soviet Union and other communist models collapsed nearly twenty years ago, the socialists in America and Europe did not admit their errors and join the friends of liberty. They looked for a new vehicle to ride to dominion over their fellow men — and they gradually found it in “global warming,” recently amended to the infinitely accomadative “climate change.”

The climate change dogma is an amazing complex of myths, the greatest of which is that man is not a part of nature, but a dangerous imposition and a threat to a fragile natural world. This is a delusion which could be coddled only amidst the wealth of an advanced civilization.

The extremists want an end to industrial civilization. That would entail a 95% decline in the number of people living on earth; and it would prove to the survivors that nature is a large and dangerous setting for humans, and even more so for civilization, which can be destroyed not only by nature, but when popular delusions draw society away from the truth.

Paul Chesser and others provide sensible antidotes to the alarmists from Climate Strategies Watch.

A Wall Street Journal editorial gets it right on the “farce” of current campaign finance regulations. They are effective — at entrenching incumbents in power.

Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge is making me look forward to my airline flights, where I can study it further.

The back jacket of my copy does an injustice to this spectacular book, by making it seem to be for scientists or philosophers only. But it is a hugely ambitious attempt to “re-equip men with the faculties which centuries of critical thought have taught them to distrust. The reader has been invited to use these faculties and contemplate thus a picture of things restored to their fairly obvious nature.” (p. 381)

It is a devastating attack on materialism or reductionism as promoted by Laplace and many others, which “has created a pervasive tension throughout our culture, similar to that generated at an earlier time by the rebellion of reason against religion, but even more comprehensive in its scope.” (p. 142)

Polanyi wants to restore confidence in a common sense view of man, life, and the world.

“For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by an objectivist framewor — once the veil of ambiguities covering up these mutilations has been definitively dissolved — many fresh minds will turn to the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will be seen to be.” (p. 381)

Polanyi was a great thinker; his insights have fundamental implications for our struggle for liberty.

I’m at the SamSphere Denver on the anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world” which launched the Revolutionary War in America — as we were reminded by Ken Marrero in a stirring introduction.It is a dangerous time in American history — and therefore world history.

In this same city in a few months one of the Democratic party will nominate an unrepentant socialist for president of the United States. This will be a candidate whose main connection to the Constitution will be fleeting discomfort with the constraints our founding principles put in the way of his (or her) ambitions.

That would create a crisis even if the Republican party were presenting a clear contrast rooted in the enduring principles of the Founding.

But instead we have a country with one party trying to lead us into an abyss, and the other trying to — I don’t really know what they are trying to do.

We need a permanent network for friends of liberty not only independent of the governments, but also independent of the political parties, which have been corrupted by law and other methods into being happy arms of the state.

The Sam Adams Alliance is hosting some wikis which invite citizens to help other citizens bring transparency and accountability to government. They are Ballotpedia, Judgepedia, and SunshineReview.

Wikis may be as revolutionary for human civilization as the invention of movable type by the printer Gutenberg around 1450 A.D.  Movable type meant that manuscripts could be produced for much lower cost, and therefore made available to thousands of people. That lead to more books, then book collections, more scholars, and an acceleration of human learning and human civilization.

However scholarship, science and other book learning were still an exclusive area, confined to the privileged, the lucky, and the occasional determined genius.Libraries later offered a wealth of knowledge to millions, just for the cost of the time. Not just the time to visit the library, but the time to search and research among dusty books and journals; information was there, on the shelves, some of it accurate, some not; but it was not easily searchable or verifiable.

Enter the internet — and much information is available. It is easy to find many things — though not so easy to verify. And it may not be easy to find just what you want. But there seems to be an expert in everything — and with wikipedia Jimmy Wales facilitates a spontaneous order F.A Hayek would have appreciated. Dispersed experts add their knowledge, engage with other experts, and reach a consensus presentation on millions of terms, events, and people.

Now wikis are developing on many other topics — some of them very important. And some covering areas where the obscurity of information is deliberate — government power and government spending. Enter Judgepedia, to cover the least accountable, but often the most powerful branch of government. How many sitting judges can you name? Most operate with great power and little scrutiny. Judgepedia offers a forum for those who know to let the rest of us find out what judges have done, and what citizens can do about it.

SunshineReview is just getting going — and it promises a window on the spending of governments at all levels — right down to the counties and school districts least likely to want citizens to look behind the budget categories that often obscure more than they reveal.

 Rose Bogeart and Leon Drolet in Michigan are setting a great example of how to respond to tax-hiking politicians.  Their effort will be historic for Michigan, and cautionary for tax hikers across the country. The following news release gives some highlights of their effort, while announcing a tax day protest.  This effort is revealing how ugly politics has gotten, as the tax-eaters ignore both the law and civility to hold onto their privileges.  Speaker Dillon and his government-employee union beneficiaries have organized “blocking” efforts to deter both circulators and signers.  (see www.dillonsthugs.com) They do not want the people to decide who represents them, much less how high their taxes should be.  The last tax hike in Michigan also hit during tough economic times — for those in the private sector — in 1983, and led to the recall of two state senators.  Recalls of legislators have been rare around the country.  A recall of a speaker of the house has never occurred.  Yet.                                                                           

Tax Protest April 15th

Citizens to Protest Speaker Dillon’s Tax Hike

 Today, the Wayne County Taxpayers Association (WCTA) announced they will be holding a taxpayers protest on April 15^th from 5:00 to 7:00pm at the Redford Township Post Office.  The WTCA will be collecting signatures to recall State House Speaker Andy Dillon (D-Redford) for his lead roll in increasing state income and business taxes.  The Redford Post Office, in suburban Wayne County, is where hundreds of citizens come to pay their taxes.

“Michigan’s taxes are killing our economy,” WTCA Chair Rose Bogaert stated.  “Speaker Andy Dillon was the lead advocate of the 12%  income tax increase and a 22% business tax hike at a time when Michigan’s families are suffering.  We are here hold him accountable by recalling him from office.” The WCTA is currently circulating petitions to put a ‘Dillon recall’ question on the August 5^th primary ballot.   Citizens from Dillon’s 17^th State House District must collect 8,724 signatures by May 1^st. “We are protesting Michigan’s crushing tax climate.  The citizens are taking action against tax-hiking politicians like Andy Dillon by recalling him from office,” Bogaert concluded.