Happy Birthday Frederic Bastiat
8 years ago
Monday, November 21, 2011
The "supercommittee": The mouse that didn't roar
Remember when we had the bogus agreement to preserve the Bush tax cuts? After months of haggling the compromise ended up being a budgetary rounding error. Now the so-called supercommittee has thrown up its hands and has given up trying to find $125 lousy billion in cuts a year for 10 years. Mind you although this was continually referred to as a $1.25 trillion cut, it actually is only 3 percent of the federal budget each year. Actually I thought that the supercommittee was anti-constitutional in the first place because the supercommittee replaced the House of Representatives which has the budgetary responsibility under the constitution. Some pundits have stated that the president who always sits on the sidelines would have gotten a deal if he wanted one. However, they argue he did not want a deal because he plans to run on a do nothing congress. The only problem is why the congressional democrats would be dumb enough to go along since they are part of the do nothingness (see Steny Hoyer's comments in a previous post). So the bottom line is that if the supercommittee succeeded it would have not made a difference. The fact that it failed reiterates the need to replace the incumbent administration and the overwhelming majority of the incumbent congress regardless of party.
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"Actually I thought that the supercommittee was anti-constitutional in the first place..."
Yeah. It is an attempt to concentrate power in fewer hands. If successful, it sets a precedent. If it fails, people may come to believe that even fewer hands are needed. This is how Caesars and Hitlers arise.
In William E. Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal one reads:
Many argued that the country could get out of the morass of indecision only by finding a leader and vesting in him dictatorial powers. Some favored an economic supercouncil which would ignore Congress and issue edicts; Henry Hazlitt proposed abandoning Congress for a directorate of twelve men. Others wished to confer on the new president the same arbitrary war powers Woodrow Wilson had been granted. Even businessmen favored granting Roosevelt dictatorial powers when he took office. Distressed by the chaotic competition in industries such as oil and textiles, alarmed by the outbursts of violence, convinced of the need for drastic budget slashing, they despaired of any leadership from Congress. "Of course we all realize that dictatorships and even semi-dictatorships in peace time are quite contrary to the spirit of American institutions and all that," remarked Barron's. "And yet -- well, a genial and lighthearted dictator might be a relief from the pompous futility of such a Congress as we have recently had. ... So we return repeatedly to the thought that a mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead."
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