(if I were the) King of the Forest

Richard Clarke’s charges that the Bush administration ignored the growing threat of Al Quaeda – and ignored his own prescient warnings about that threat – in the months leading up to the attack on the World Trade Center became a cause celebre among those who wished fervently to believe both in the incompetence or venality of the President and his policies and in the capacity for government to keep us safe from such atrocities. If we only listened to smart and dedicated people like Richard Clarke (and his old boss, Bill Clinton) then we could have back our golden age.

That is certainly the story that was told by the news media. But notwithstanding subsequent revelations about Mr. Clarke’s apparent epiphany on the dangers of Islamic Fascism between his services on the Clinton and Bush foreign policy teams, is it really reasonable to expect that a new President and a new administration – even if they have both a vision and a mandate – is going to turn around decades of policy thought and practice in their first nine months in office?

The question of the day seems to be whether Spain’s election results and subsequent announcement that they would withdraw their troops from Iraq amounted to an exercise in democracy or an act of appeasement. Notwithstanding the vehemence and sanctimony accompanying pronouncements either way, the answer may simply be “Yes. Both.”

The rebellion in Haiti that brought U.N. peacekeepers to the island early in 2004 came during the heat of the Democratic presidential primary season. As a result every candidate felt the need not only to make some pronouncement on the situation but to criticize the administration for its response. At times it seemed the response itself was irrelevant to the critique – politics demanded criticism whatever the policy might be.

That kind of thinking, moreover, frames the debate on everything else. During the last presidential election, when it appeared we might actually have some temporary budget surplus lying around, we heard hundreds of proposals for how to spend the money – almost all of them by making permanent commitments to entitlement programs rather than one-time commitments to capital improvements. To someone who has to manage cash flow and capital needs for either a family or a business using a finite reserve fund as a down-payment on permanent spending commitments seems ludicrous; in an environment where there is no distinction between operations and infrastructure it seems routine.

In an age when charity was the primary means for providing a social safety net and cultural enrichment charity was a matter of moral obligation. We would like to think that is still the case, but according to the CBO such endeavors now consume somewhere between 55% and 75% of the federal budget, and anyone in the top quintile of income distribution is already providing at least 15%-20% of their income as taxes to various governments in direct support of that. Perhaps direct giving to charity is only 2% of income, but if you add the 15% or more of indirect contribution to the same causes via the channel of government I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

The fact that complexities were over-simplified is part of the format and a necessary evil. However, at the end one of the characters, as a closing remark on the Constitution, read from its preamble. Nice touch – except that they left part of it (many would say the most important part) out. What they read was:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, …. , promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to us and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution of the United States of America“.

What was left out, of course, were two of the primary purposes of government, ones which provide the necessary specifics for fulfilling what the Declaration of Independence considered the very reason for government to exist – the protection of individual rights. The missing phrases were:

“… to ensure domestic tranquility, to provide for the common defense, …“.

A down economy always catalyzes calls for increased government spending on all manner of “relief” programs. It has long been a mystery to me where people get the idea that money spent by government appears magically from the wellspring of good intentions – that resources used by government are not extracted from use elsewhere but are “free” and therefore painless. I suppose it comes from the fantasy that it is always possible to arrange for “someone else” to pay for those resources – that “I” (and everyone else) can assign the pain to “you” and take the benefit for myself. How to make that selfish arrangement seems to be a primary topic of debate in modern political discourse.

As both an option-holder and a shareholder in various companies I agree that options should be reported in some manner other than a footnote, but I vehemently disagree that calling them an “expense” – on a par with cash outlays like salaries – is the correct accounting form.

I understand that James Garcia doesn’t like George W. Bush because he is a (shudder!) Republican, and (worse!) conservative, but please: George Bush is evil because he did what Mr. Garcia wanted him to do, but without sufficient sincerity?

I tend to be cynical about government so government ineptitude rarely shocks me. The electricity crisis in California provided an exception. It wasn’t just the up front stupidity that amazed but the refusal to acknowledge it even after the fact. It was bad enough that the original “deregulation” program included such regulatory aspects as freezing retail prices, forcing distributors to pay the highest bid price on the wholesale market, and mandating utility divestiture of power plants; the legislature later added a prohibition on entering into long-term contracts, thus guaranteeing all purchases had to be made in the spot market. What is amazing is not that there was a crisis, but that it took so long to happen.