According to Janet Napolitano and most of the mainstream media, I’m an “extremist”; I’m pro-life, anti-tax, pro-Second-and-Tenth Amendment…<\/p>\n
…which, to some, means “anti-government”; as if “wanting just the parts of government we really need” is in some way the same as wanting the government to be overthrown.<\/p>\n
Here’s one of my “extremist” beliefs; that the government that governns best, governs least.\u00a0 Of course, that was really Thomas Jefferson – who, let’s never forget, was also an extremist.<\/p>\n
Look – most of the case for limited government boils down to this:\u00a0 The Constitution really defines what government is supposed to do; defend the nation, look out for the “general welfare”, raise taxes for federal functions <\/em>(which at one point meant “functions that were properly the province of the Feds, although that’s been bastardized beyond recognition for the past couple of generations), \u00a0sign treaties with foreign governments, interpret the Constitution and, since the end of the Civil War, make sure that “equality before the law” is a unform, national thing; above all, per the Tenth Amendment, to keep its hands off <\/em>of everything else.<\/p>\n But you can hear that from the entire Libertarian Party, and a fair chunk of the libertarian wing of the GOP; that’s Conservatism 101 (or, if you’re talking with Keith Olberman or Nancy Pelosi or Janet Napolitano, “extremism”, but I digress).<\/p>\n There’s another, ethical reason to limit the size and power of government.\u00a0 It does in unbendable fact what capitalism supposedly does; it arbitrarily picks winners.<\/p>\n Imagine that you’re a barber.\u00a0 You live in, let’s say, Portland, Oregon, a city with nine other barbers.\u00a0 Now, being plagued with hippies, it’s not the best town to be a barber.\u00a0 But you get word that the guys from Phish are going to all get flattops; knowing what a bunch of “non-conformists” hippies are, you and your nine fellow barbers are getting ready for an avalanche of business.<\/p>\n As one of your items of business, you set up a PAC – call it “Portland Cares about Hair”.\u00a0 You publicize photos of bad flat-tops.\u00a0 “Portland must demand better”, the ads say.\u00a0 And you go before the Portland City Commissariat<\/span> Council, and convince them that bad flat-tops are something that government must prevent – so they should impose a license on the barber trade, with licenses going to would-be\u00a0barbers who have passed a license exam issued by the “Board of Barber Examiners” – a panel of three barbers drawn from among the ten of you.\u00a0 Which means that, as the hordes of hippies wander about looking for flat-tops, there are only ten shops to go to; all of the hippies who try to start their own barber shops are busted by the cops and fined for “barbering without a license”.<\/p>\n In other words, you and your nine barber friends have just used government to give you a better, more commanding market position.<\/p>\n Business does this all the time; the bigger the business, the bigger the likelihood they’ll get government to clamp down on the market for them:<\/p>\n Yes, that’s the largest investment bank on Wall Street calling for stricter regulation from Washington. Stoll has a pretty straightforward explanation:<\/p>\n What [Goldman CEO Lloyd] Blankfein and Mr. Cohn are now saying is that their desire for higher capital requirements isn’t related to concern about their ability to control Goldman<\/em>‘s risk-taking (“Please, Mr. Government, supervise me more closely, allow me to borrow less money, and force me to take less risk”), but their ability to assess and judge the risks of their counterparties<\/em>, the other firms they are doing deals with.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why should Goldman have to pay for mitigating the risk of its deal-partners when the SEC or the Fed can do Goldman’s work for it — on the taxpayer dime?<\/p>\n This is further evidence of what I’ve been saying<\/a> for months: just as tobacco regulation was a gift to Philip Morris<\/a>, toy regulation was a gift to Mattel<\/a>, and health-care “reform” was a gift to Big Pharma<\/a>, financial reform will improve Goldman’s profitability, Obama’s populist rhetoric notwithstanding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Government has no more business picking winners than it has defining who shall lose.\u00a0 At least, it shouldn’t.<\/p>\n I know.\u00a0 What an extremist I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" According to Janet Napolitano and most of the mainstream media, I’m an “extremist”; I’m pro-life, anti-tax, pro-Second-and-Tenth Amendment… …which, to some, means “anti-government”; as if “wanting just the parts of government we really need” is in some way the same as wanting the government to be overthrown. Here’s one of my “extremist” beliefs; that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9293"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9937,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9293\/revisions\/9937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}