Jerry Remmer’s rather salient post with regards to the outrage over the bonuses AIG gave to their executives and Congress’s “solution” to this problem had me wondering whether anyone else has noticed that so many of the problems that Congress seeks to solve have—in fact—been caused (in part) by former “solutions” that Congress came up with.
As I pointed out in the comments section in response to Jerry’s post, I think Congressman Ron Paul summed this current controversy up pretty well on CNN on Friday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MshgrVIJF28
Well, it happened because we did something that was outrageous. These bonuses are outrageous. 165 million dollars is a lot of money. But so is 700 billion dollars of unconstitutional appropriations. That’s where the problem came from. So yes, people are concentrating on these bonuses right now, but they’re missing the point. The point is that we shouldn’t be in the business of bailing out all these companies. And we don’t even know where the rest of the money went. We just discovered—probably inadvertently—that there were some bonuses. Now everybody is outraged, which they should be. So what do they do? They pass 700 billion dollars worth of unconstitutional appropriations. Then they come in and they discover this. The public gets notice of it, so the Congress has to act and feel outraged. So they pass a bill, which is an ex post facto bill, as well as a bill of attainder, which is unconstitutional. So they’re using the tax code to punish people. So they do one harm—one thing wrong—they create a problem—an unintended consequence. Then they go back and they solve the problem by more of the same. Which is essentially what we are doing with our economy . . .
Because they—in Congress, they panic. They react minute to minute, whether it’s passing the PATRIOT ACT or doing all these things. They react in emotional ways. So when the banking crisis hit, instead of dealing with
over the last decade, which I’ve been begging and pleading for them to do, they wait and “Oh there’s a financial crisis.” Oh, it came from too much spending, too much taxes, and too much printing of money. So what do they do? They spend more! They blindly appropriate this money. And I just think the whole process is outrageous! . . . Ultimately, Congress should assume responsibility. This is what’s happened over the many, many decades—that we have transferred the responsibility of the Congress into the executive branch. The executive branch writes laws, and the courts rule, and Congress has reneged so much on their responsibility. And now all we know how to do is . . . spend money.
don’t say how it should be spent, and then we allow the Federal Reserve to print money. We can’t audit the Federal Reserve. So it’s Congress’s fault. If Congress would wake up, we could reign in a lot of this. So, to me, it was very annoying to concentrate on doing what we were doing on Thursday and pretending we were going to improve things. This is just a gross distraction from the important issues that we should be dealing with.
Politicians are like lemmings. They are so eager to prove to the American public that they share its concern, that they’re willing to jump on board the bandwagon and pass the latest law—no matter how bad it is and even if they haven’t even read it.
I blame the American people as well for their insistence that Congress impose a new law for every problem that comes down the pike without regard to their constitutional limitations. It seems that, in the eyes of the American people, a sin of commission is forgivable while a sin of omission is absolutely unforgivable.
Birthplace: San Diego, CA
Birthdate: That’s for me to know
Political Party: Independent
Political Philosophy: Libertarian-liberal