Isn’t it interesting that Obama is the least modern president of memory? His policies are a throw-back to FDR and he is obviously a split-the-pie rather than a grow-the-pie type of thinker. This looking back to the good old days of government expansion and intervention along with the spread the wealth mentality make sense of his comments on technological displacement. Obama saying that employment is lagging because innovations such as ATMs and kiosks show that this smart president is woefully ignorant. Obama is Ned Ludd – the British weaver displaced by mechanized looms thought he could get his job back by smashing and burning the looms. Instead of being rehired, he was hung. Someone needs to tell the president that thousands of jobs in the horse and buggy industry were lost when Henry Ford automated the automobile assembly line. When I was in graduate school thousands of women worked in typing pools at universities – all displaced by the PC and word processing. Obama must have taken classes at Harvard from professors who were members of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution who predicted in the 1960s that technology by the year 2000 would cause 90 percent of the labor force to be unemployed. When they made this prediction, I took the number of horses in 1863, ran my computer and discovered that by 1975 we would all be dead having been buried under 30 feed of horse manure worldwide.
The president does not realize that the displacement of workers by technology has not created permanent increases in unemployment. Technology creates new jobs and new opportunities for the creation of entirely new industries and jobs. I have lived through periods when there were not even transistors much less no color tvs, no cell phones, no ipads, no PCs, no Velcro, no personal software, no internet, and no gore-tex. The massive layoffs of middle managers during the recession of the early 1990s spurred a dramatic growth in entrepreneurial startups.
Technology is the single greatest threat to our society today. However, that has always been the case and always will be. I'm a professor and professors love to profess. The agricultural revolution was actually a technological revolution that replaced the hunting and gathering age. It devastated the existing political structure. Where once there were tribal groupings, now there were city states and feudal kingdoms. Then came the industrial revolution (obviously a technological revolution) and with it came mass production, mass bureaucracies, mass political organizations, and countries. Swept away, often violently, were the city states and feudal kingdoms. The old structure resisted but died. Workers also resisted but failed. Ned lud and his luddites were tailors displaced by automatic looms. Their reaction was to try and stop progress by burning them down. They failed and progress marched on. But the industrial revolution also occurred in agriculture, displacing workers and driving them to the cities. Yes there were sweat shops, horrible living conditions, child labor, rampant disease. But the workers were no longer serfs and indentured laborers on the farm. They were free and would shape the political structure of the future. Technology would aid the workers in the form of the printing press. Once information was the sole province of the church and its power was related to its control of information. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas was considered a genius because not only could he read, but he could read without moving his lips. The printing press changed all that and with widely disseminated news came the reduction in the power of the church.
Technology does not destroy jobs. It creates them. Implying that rolling back technology will create jobs shows that this modern president is actually the reincarnation of Ned Ludd.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
More random thoughts
1. Why is it that all female anchors smile when they deliver the news but no men do? It must be gender specific because have you ever tried to smile and talk at the same time? Even those who can't smile and talk at the same time always smile before and after they speak. Even the women on news panels smile when they are introduced. What gives?
2. Has anyone questioned the relationship between Madeline Albright and George Soros. News reported that a company they owned jointly bought a controlling stake in the energy firm APR for $250 million in March and then sold it for $800 million in June! Albright is also a trustee for the Center for American Progress - a think tank funded by Soros. Albright also lends her name to Albright Capital Management Company. Does anyone really think that she knows anything about either energy or investments? Her background is as an academic and political appointee in international affairs not in economics and finance. Lastly, where did she get the money to start buying companies? Nothing in her background shows the income generated necessary to be buying companies. And what about the George Soros connection? Why isn't this being scrutinized?
3. The ruling by the NLRB that Boeing could not open a plant in South Carolina is puzzling to me. How does the NLRB have the constitutional authority to dictate where or where not firms can operate? Since the plant is built and the workers hired, why doesn't Boeing just go ahead and operate it? Of course this has to be one of the dumbest rulings by the administration's lackeys. If Boeing can't go to a right to work state, it will make those aircraft out of the country. Some of said that Obama is doing this to appease the unions. I think maybe the fact that Washington's two senators are liberal democrats and South Carolina's senators are republicans including Jim DeMint may play a small role.
4. It will be interesting to see if EPA's war on coal fired plants will alter the political scene in the states most affected. West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana (along with Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas produce 90 percent of the country's coal. The EPS's proposed rules would shut down 60 coal fired plants and is said to destroy 250,000 jobs. How the democrats will be able to hold onto house and senate seats in the affected states will be interesting to see.
5. Did you know that both the Seminole Wars and Texas independence are both a direct consequence of slavery? The Seminoles did not recognize slavery and welcomed escaped slaves into their ranks. White slave owners agitated to get their slaves returned. The Seminoles refused. Osceola was even married to the daughter of a runaway slave and her kidnapping by whites was a main motivation for his leading the Seminoles into war. Also Texas was a province of Mexico which abolished slavery in 1829 and sought to ban it in Texas. The constant conflict between white Texans and Mexico over slavery finally exploded into the war of 1835 and the Alamo in 1836.
6. I am against a balanced budget amendment because it does not constrain spending. If spending increases then the legislature will likely balance it by raising taxes. The debt ceiling is a better constraint.
7. Notice how it has now become the vogue to adopt my idea of limiting government spending to a set percentage of GDP?
8. California has stopped the paychecks of state legislators for failing to pass a budget. What a great idea! Let's do that with the Congress.
2. Has anyone questioned the relationship between Madeline Albright and George Soros. News reported that a company they owned jointly bought a controlling stake in the energy firm APR for $250 million in March and then sold it for $800 million in June! Albright is also a trustee for the Center for American Progress - a think tank funded by Soros. Albright also lends her name to Albright Capital Management Company. Does anyone really think that she knows anything about either energy or investments? Her background is as an academic and political appointee in international affairs not in economics and finance. Lastly, where did she get the money to start buying companies? Nothing in her background shows the income generated necessary to be buying companies. And what about the George Soros connection? Why isn't this being scrutinized?
3. The ruling by the NLRB that Boeing could not open a plant in South Carolina is puzzling to me. How does the NLRB have the constitutional authority to dictate where or where not firms can operate? Since the plant is built and the workers hired, why doesn't Boeing just go ahead and operate it? Of course this has to be one of the dumbest rulings by the administration's lackeys. If Boeing can't go to a right to work state, it will make those aircraft out of the country. Some of said that Obama is doing this to appease the unions. I think maybe the fact that Washington's two senators are liberal democrats and South Carolina's senators are republicans including Jim DeMint may play a small role.
4. It will be interesting to see if EPA's war on coal fired plants will alter the political scene in the states most affected. West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana (along with Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Texas produce 90 percent of the country's coal. The EPS's proposed rules would shut down 60 coal fired plants and is said to destroy 250,000 jobs. How the democrats will be able to hold onto house and senate seats in the affected states will be interesting to see.
5. Did you know that both the Seminole Wars and Texas independence are both a direct consequence of slavery? The Seminoles did not recognize slavery and welcomed escaped slaves into their ranks. White slave owners agitated to get their slaves returned. The Seminoles refused. Osceola was even married to the daughter of a runaway slave and her kidnapping by whites was a main motivation for his leading the Seminoles into war. Also Texas was a province of Mexico which abolished slavery in 1829 and sought to ban it in Texas. The constant conflict between white Texans and Mexico over slavery finally exploded into the war of 1835 and the Alamo in 1836.
6. I am against a balanced budget amendment because it does not constrain spending. If spending increases then the legislature will likely balance it by raising taxes. The debt ceiling is a better constraint.
7. Notice how it has now become the vogue to adopt my idea of limiting government spending to a set percentage of GDP?
8. California has stopped the paychecks of state legislators for failing to pass a budget. What a great idea! Let's do that with the Congress.
Not a diamond in the rough
Peter Diamond withdrew his name from being a FEderal Reserve governor nominee. Diamond who is an MIT labor economist was clearly miffed. He wrote a self serving whine in the New York Times lamenting that while he was qualified to be awarded a Nobel prize in economics, certainly he was qualified to be on the Fed board. He is wrong. Certainly a Nobel prize is noteworthy but it does not guarantee expertise in monetary economics or financial institutions. Indeed, Diamond's area is labor economics and although Diamond says that understanding of the labor market is a "central part" of managing monetary policy, that statement by itself should disqualify him. Sen. Shelby (R-AL) ranking minority member of Senate Banking was right to insist on someone who would not need on the job training as Mr. Diamond would require. Put Diamond on the NLRB but not the Fed board.
Pop!
An area where the left and the right find agreement is in housing. The right seems to be against housing because it is subsidized and is used by the government to advance social policies (i.e. affordable housing). The left seems to be against housing because detached dwellings consume more energy than high density dwellings. As a consequence the sacred cow of mortgage interest deductions appear to be on the chopping block. The politicians can say that in these days of large deficits, everything is under scrutiny. The truth of the matter is that the politicians are just looking for more sources of revenue. What makes housing an attractive whipping boy is the housing bust caused as much by cheap credit fostered by federal reserve policy than by subsidies, affordable housing and fannie mae. Even the Wall St Journal says that the main purpose of housing should be shelter. However, homeownership has been one of the main vehicles for wealth building in America. Homeowners build equity that can be used for kid's college education and for retirement. Traditionally, the growth in equity has been a superior investment vehicle for Americans. However, homeownership also means other things to most Americans who opt not to live in high density areas like Washington, DC and New York City. It means privacy, space, peace and quiet. Since the bursting of the housing bubble, house prices should fall to a new equilibrium level just like any other investment. Then it will start to grow again. The positive benefits of homeownership will continue with or without all of the government interference. However, for those in DC and New York who are forced to live on top of each other to insist that those of us who prefer to live amongst trees with room for our dogs to run are somehow either bad for the business environment or the green environment are simply jealous and trying to impose their inferior lifestyle on the rest of us.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
So who do you want to be president and why?
I have often said that if Michele Bachmann were a democrat she would be idolized by the media - instead she is vilified like Sarah Palin. Actually, thank goodness for Sarah Palin. Palin has been spoofed so much, vilified so much that the left and the media have used up all their bullets. So the anti-Bachmann stuff just seems petty. How can you spoof someone who quotes Von Mises? Here is Stephen Moore's interview of Bachmann.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
The Wall Street Journal
JUNE 11, 2011
'On the Beach, I Bring von Mises'
The tea party favorite on her start in politics, where she learned her economics, and why she disagrees with Reagan on the War Powers Resolution.
By STEPHEN MOORE
"If I'm in, I'll be all in," says Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, artfully dodging my question of whether she's running for president. Given that she just hired campaign strategist Ed Rollins, whose past clients include Ross Perot and Mike Huckabee, rumors abound. "We're getting close," she says, "and if I do run, like all my races, I will work like a maniac."
That's pretty much how she does everything, and it helps explain how the relatively junior congresswoman has become a tea party superstar—and uniquely adept at driving liberals bonkers.
After spending a good part of two days with her in Washington as she scurries from one appointment to another, I have no doubt that Ms. Bachmann will announce her presidential bid soon. And it would be a mistake to count her out: She's defied the prognosticators in nearly every race she's run since thrashing an 18-year incumbent in the Minnesota Senate by 20 points in 2000. Says Iowa Congressman Steve King, "No one has electrified Iowa crowds like Michelle has."
Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."
As we rush from her first-floor digs in the Cannon House Office Building to the House floor so she can vote, I ask for her explanation of the 2008 financial meltdown. "There were a lot of bad actors involved, but it started with the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter and then the enhanced amendments that Bill Clinton made to force, in effect, banks to make loans to people who lacked creditworthiness. If you want to come down to a bottom line of 'How did we get in the mess?' I think it was a reduction in standards."
She continues: "Nobody wanted to say, 'No.' The implicit and then the explicit guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sopping up the losses. Being on the Financial Services Committee, I can assure you, all roads lead to Freddie and Fannie."
Steve Moore says that Rep. Michele Bachmann could win Iowa.
Ms. Bachmann voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) "both times," she boasts, and she has no regrets since Congress "just gave the Treasury a $700 billion blank check." She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. "During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions, and his response was, 'Well, Congress passed the law.'"
Insufficient focus on constitutional limits to federal power is a Bachmann pet peeve. "It's like when you come up to a stop sign and you're driving. Some people have it in their mind that the stop sign is optional. The Constitution is government's stop sign. It says, you—the three branches of government—can go so far and no farther. With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided 'Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.'"
Does this mean she would have favored allowing the banks to fail? "I would have. People think when you have a, quote, 'bank failure,' that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes."
She also bristles at the idea, pushed of late by the White House, that the auto bailouts were a big success for workers and taxpayers. "We'll probably be out $15 billion. What was galling to so many investors was that Chrysler's secured creditors were supposed to receive 100% payout of the first money. We essentially watched over 100 years of bankruptcy law thrown out the window and President Obama eviscerated the private property interests of the secured creditors. He called them 'greedy' for enforcing their own legal rights."
So what would she have done? "For one, I believe my policies prior to '08 would have been much different from [President Bush's]. I wouldn't have spent so much money," she says, pointing in particular at the Department of Education and the Medicare prescription drug bill. "I would have advocated for greater reductions in the corporate tax rate and reductions in the capital gains rate—even more so than what the president did." Mr. Bush cut the capital gains rate to 15% from 20% in 2003.
She's also no fan of the Federal Reserve's decade-long policy of flooding the U.S. economy with cheap money. "I love a lowered interest rate like anyone else. But clearly the Fed has had competing goals and objectives. One is the soundness of money and then the other is jobs. The two different objectives are hard to reconcile. What has gotten us into deep trouble and has people so perturbed is the debasing of the currency."
That's why, if she were president, she wouldn't renominate Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman: "I think that it's very important to demonstrate to the American people that the Federal Reserve will have a new sheriff" to keep the dollar strong and stable.
As for foreign policy, she joined 86 other House Republicans last week in voting for the resolution sponsored by antiwar Democrat Dennis Kucinich to stop U.S. military action in Libya within 15 days. Is she a Midwestern isolationist? "I was opposed to the U.S. involvement in Libya from the very start," she says. "President Obama has never made a compelling national security case on Libya."
Even more striking, she says the 1973 War Powers Resolution, requiring congressional approval for military action after 60 days, is "the law of the land" and must be obeyed. That's a notable difference from every recent president of either party, including Ronald Reagan.
Ms. Bachmann attributes many of her views, especially on economics, to her middle-class upbringing in 1960s Iowa and Minnesota. She talks with almost religious fervor about the virtues of living frugally, working hard and long hours, and avoiding debt. When she was growing up, she recalls admiringly, Iowa dairy farmers worked from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Her political opponents on the left portray her as a "she-devil," in her words, a caricature at odds with her life accomplishments. She's a mother of five, and she and her husband helped raise 23 teenage foster children in their home, as many as four at a time. They succeeded in getting all 23 through high school and later founded a charter school.
She got started in politics after seeing the failures in public schooling. "The kids were coloring posters in 11th grade algebra class," she says. "I decided to do my duty, go to the Republican convention. I had on jeans, a sweatshirt with a hole in it, white moccasins, and I showed up in this auditorium and everyone said, 'Why are we nominating this guy [Gary] Laidig every four years?'"
"I thought, 'I'm nobody from nowhere but maybe if I challenge the guy, he'll shape up a little bit.' So I gave a five-minute speech on freedom, economic liberty and all the rest. And no one could believe it, but I won a supermajority on the first ballot and he was out on his keister."
She ran for Congress in 2006, the worst year for Republicans in two decades. "Nancy Pelosi and all her horses spent $9.6 million to defeat me in that race"—almost three times what Ms. Bachmann had raised. She won 50% to 42%. In 2010, the Democrats and their union allies raised more than $10 million to try to defeat her. "My adversaries have certainly been highly motivated," she says.
But her adversaries—or, at least, rivals—aren't limited to the left. There's Sarah Palin, with whom journalists are convinced she has frosty relations, and fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty, now running for president. About Ms. Palin the congresswoman shrugs, "People want to see a mud-wrestling fight. They won't get it from me because I like Sarah Palin and I respect her." As for whether Mr. Pawlenty was a good governor, "I really don't want to comment."
Ever ready to cite stories from American history, Ms. Bachmann notes with a grin that the last House member to be elected president was James Garfield in 1880. If she were to take her shot, she'd run on an economic package reminiscent of Jack Kemp, the late congressman who championed supply-side economics and was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. "In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax."
The 3.8 million-word U.S. tax code may be irreparable, she says, a view she's held since working as a tax attorney at the IRS 20 years ago. "I love the FAIR tax. If we were starting over from scratch, I would favor a national sales tax." But she's not a sponsor of the FAIR tax bill because she fears that enacting it won't end the income tax, and "we would end up with a dual tax, a national sales tax and an income tax."
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that "gets rid of all the deductions." A system in which 47% of Americans don't pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, "because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something."
On the stump she emphasizes an "America-centered energy policy" based on "drilling and mining for our rich resources here." And she believes that repealing ObamaCare is a precondition to restoring a prosperous economy. "You cannot have a pro-growth economy and advise, simultaneously, socialized medicine."
Her big challenge is whether the country is ready to support deep spending cuts. On this issue, she carries a sharper blade than everyone except Ron Paul. She voted for the Paul Ryan budget—but "with an asterisk." Why? "The asterisk is that we've got a huge messaging problem [on Medicare]. It needs to be called the 55-and-Under Plan. I can't tell you the number of 78-year-old women who think we're going to pull the rug out from under them."
Ms. Bachmann also voted for the Republican Study Committee budget that cuts deeper and faster than even Mr. Ryan would. "We do have an obligation with Social Security and Medicare, and we have to recognize that" for those who are already retired, she says. But after that, it's Katy bar the door: "Everything else is expendable to bring spending down," and she'd ax "whole departments" including the Department of Education.
"I think people realize the crisis we face isn't in 25 years or even 10 years off. It is right now. And people want it solved now—especially Republican primary voters."
Mr. Moore is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW
The Wall Street Journal
JUNE 11, 2011
'On the Beach, I Bring von Mises'
The tea party favorite on her start in politics, where she learned her economics, and why she disagrees with Reagan on the War Powers Resolution.
By STEPHEN MOORE
"If I'm in, I'll be all in," says Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, artfully dodging my question of whether she's running for president. Given that she just hired campaign strategist Ed Rollins, whose past clients include Ross Perot and Mike Huckabee, rumors abound. "We're getting close," she says, "and if I do run, like all my races, I will work like a maniac."
That's pretty much how she does everything, and it helps explain how the relatively junior congresswoman has become a tea party superstar—and uniquely adept at driving liberals bonkers.
After spending a good part of two days with her in Washington as she scurries from one appointment to another, I have no doubt that Ms. Bachmann will announce her presidential bid soon. And it would be a mistake to count her out: She's defied the prognosticators in nearly every race she's run since thrashing an 18-year incumbent in the Minnesota Senate by 20 points in 2000. Says Iowa Congressman Steve King, "No one has electrified Iowa crowds like Michelle has."
Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. "I'm also an Art Laffer fiend—we're very close," she adds. "And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises," getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like "Human Action" and "Bureaucracy." "When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises."
As we rush from her first-floor digs in the Cannon House Office Building to the House floor so she can vote, I ask for her explanation of the 2008 financial meltdown. "There were a lot of bad actors involved, but it started with the Community Reinvestment Act under Jimmy Carter and then the enhanced amendments that Bill Clinton made to force, in effect, banks to make loans to people who lacked creditworthiness. If you want to come down to a bottom line of 'How did we get in the mess?' I think it was a reduction in standards."
She continues: "Nobody wanted to say, 'No.' The implicit and then the explicit guarantees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were sopping up the losses. Being on the Financial Services Committee, I can assure you, all roads lead to Freddie and Fannie."
Steve Moore says that Rep. Michele Bachmann could win Iowa.
Ms. Bachmann voted against the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) "both times," she boasts, and she has no regrets since Congress "just gave the Treasury a $700 billion blank check." She complains that no one bothered to ask about the constitutionality of these extraordinary interventions into the financial markets. "During a recent hearing I asked Secretary [Timothy] Geithner three times where the constitution authorized the Treasury's actions, and his response was, 'Well, Congress passed the law.'"
Insufficient focus on constitutional limits to federal power is a Bachmann pet peeve. "It's like when you come up to a stop sign and you're driving. Some people have it in their mind that the stop sign is optional. The Constitution is government's stop sign. It says, you—the three branches of government—can go so far and no farther. With TARP, the government blew through the Constitutional stop sign and decided 'Whatever it takes, that's what we're going to do.'"
Does this mean she would have favored allowing the banks to fail? "I would have. People think when you have a, quote, 'bank failure,' that that is the end of the bank. And it isn't necessarily. A normal way that the American free market system has worked is that we have a process of unwinding. It's called bankruptcy. It doesn't mean, necessarily, that the industry is eclipsed or that it's gone. Often times, the phoenix rises out of the ashes."
She also bristles at the idea, pushed of late by the White House, that the auto bailouts were a big success for workers and taxpayers. "We'll probably be out $15 billion. What was galling to so many investors was that Chrysler's secured creditors were supposed to receive 100% payout of the first money. We essentially watched over 100 years of bankruptcy law thrown out the window and President Obama eviscerated the private property interests of the secured creditors. He called them 'greedy' for enforcing their own legal rights."
So what would she have done? "For one, I believe my policies prior to '08 would have been much different from [President Bush's]. I wouldn't have spent so much money," she says, pointing in particular at the Department of Education and the Medicare prescription drug bill. "I would have advocated for greater reductions in the corporate tax rate and reductions in the capital gains rate—even more so than what the president did." Mr. Bush cut the capital gains rate to 15% from 20% in 2003.
She's also no fan of the Federal Reserve's decade-long policy of flooding the U.S. economy with cheap money. "I love a lowered interest rate like anyone else. But clearly the Fed has had competing goals and objectives. One is the soundness of money and then the other is jobs. The two different objectives are hard to reconcile. What has gotten us into deep trouble and has people so perturbed is the debasing of the currency."
That's why, if she were president, she wouldn't renominate Ben Bernanke as Fed chairman: "I think that it's very important to demonstrate to the American people that the Federal Reserve will have a new sheriff" to keep the dollar strong and stable.
As for foreign policy, she joined 86 other House Republicans last week in voting for the resolution sponsored by antiwar Democrat Dennis Kucinich to stop U.S. military action in Libya within 15 days. Is she a Midwestern isolationist? "I was opposed to the U.S. involvement in Libya from the very start," she says. "President Obama has never made a compelling national security case on Libya."
Even more striking, she says the 1973 War Powers Resolution, requiring congressional approval for military action after 60 days, is "the law of the land" and must be obeyed. That's a notable difference from every recent president of either party, including Ronald Reagan.
Ms. Bachmann attributes many of her views, especially on economics, to her middle-class upbringing in 1960s Iowa and Minnesota. She talks with almost religious fervor about the virtues of living frugally, working hard and long hours, and avoiding debt. When she was growing up, she recalls admiringly, Iowa dairy farmers worked from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Her political opponents on the left portray her as a "she-devil," in her words, a caricature at odds with her life accomplishments. She's a mother of five, and she and her husband helped raise 23 teenage foster children in their home, as many as four at a time. They succeeded in getting all 23 through high school and later founded a charter school.
She got started in politics after seeing the failures in public schooling. "The kids were coloring posters in 11th grade algebra class," she says. "I decided to do my duty, go to the Republican convention. I had on jeans, a sweatshirt with a hole in it, white moccasins, and I showed up in this auditorium and everyone said, 'Why are we nominating this guy [Gary] Laidig every four years?'"
"I thought, 'I'm nobody from nowhere but maybe if I challenge the guy, he'll shape up a little bit.' So I gave a five-minute speech on freedom, economic liberty and all the rest. And no one could believe it, but I won a supermajority on the first ballot and he was out on his keister."
She ran for Congress in 2006, the worst year for Republicans in two decades. "Nancy Pelosi and all her horses spent $9.6 million to defeat me in that race"—almost three times what Ms. Bachmann had raised. She won 50% to 42%. In 2010, the Democrats and their union allies raised more than $10 million to try to defeat her. "My adversaries have certainly been highly motivated," she says.
But her adversaries—or, at least, rivals—aren't limited to the left. There's Sarah Palin, with whom journalists are convinced she has frosty relations, and fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty, now running for president. About Ms. Palin the congresswoman shrugs, "People want to see a mud-wrestling fight. They won't get it from me because I like Sarah Palin and I respect her." As for whether Mr. Pawlenty was a good governor, "I really don't want to comment."
Ever ready to cite stories from American history, Ms. Bachmann notes with a grin that the last House member to be elected president was James Garfield in 1880. If she were to take her shot, she'd run on an economic package reminiscent of Jack Kemp, the late congressman who championed supply-side economics and was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. "In my perfect world," she explains, "we'd take the 35% corporate tax rate down to nine so that we're the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax."
The 3.8 million-word U.S. tax code may be irreparable, she says, a view she's held since working as a tax attorney at the IRS 20 years ago. "I love the FAIR tax. If we were starting over from scratch, I would favor a national sales tax." But she's not a sponsor of the FAIR tax bill because she fears that enacting it won't end the income tax, and "we would end up with a dual tax, a national sales tax and an income tax."
Her main goal is to get tax rates down with a broad-based income tax that everyone pays and that "gets rid of all the deductions." A system in which 47% of Americans don't pay any tax is ruinous for a democracy, she says, "because there is no tie to the government benefits that people demand. I think everyone should have to pay something."
On the stump she emphasizes an "America-centered energy policy" based on "drilling and mining for our rich resources here." And she believes that repealing ObamaCare is a precondition to restoring a prosperous economy. "You cannot have a pro-growth economy and advise, simultaneously, socialized medicine."
Her big challenge is whether the country is ready to support deep spending cuts. On this issue, she carries a sharper blade than everyone except Ron Paul. She voted for the Paul Ryan budget—but "with an asterisk." Why? "The asterisk is that we've got a huge messaging problem [on Medicare]. It needs to be called the 55-and-Under Plan. I can't tell you the number of 78-year-old women who think we're going to pull the rug out from under them."
Ms. Bachmann also voted for the Republican Study Committee budget that cuts deeper and faster than even Mr. Ryan would. "We do have an obligation with Social Security and Medicare, and we have to recognize that" for those who are already retired, she says. But after that, it's Katy bar the door: "Everything else is expendable to bring spending down," and she'd ax "whole departments" including the Department of Education.
"I think people realize the crisis we face isn't in 25 years or even 10 years off. It is right now. And people want it solved now—especially Republican primary voters."
Mr. Moore is a member of The Journal's editorial board.
Does Newt know about this?
As you know, ethanol is evidence of three of Harold Black's laws: 1. if it is mandated it is bad 2. if it is subsidized it is bad and 3. if competition is restricted it is bad. We all know that if Iowa did not have the first important presidential primary that we would not have the ethanol albatross. What idiot would mandate that we buy a product that is worse for the environment than fossil fuels, shorten engine life, and drives up food prices? Only an idiot would advocate burning up food and further impoverishing the world's poor. Yet ethanol does all of this with the US allocating a ridiculous 40 percent of its corn production for ethanol and causing food riots around the world. Of course we don't pay much attention to poor people in poor countries rioting because the price of corn - a vital foodstuff - has sharply risen. Now if the good old boys who use corn to bait for deer start rioting because a 50 pound bag that used to cost $4.50 now is $11 then the administration would take notice. Now comes the UN. How many times can you think of agreeing with anything coming out of the UN? For me, its one. The UN just published a report has called for an end to ethanol subsidies, citing ethanol as a primary cause of rising food prices worldwide. I am waiting to hear Newt Gingrich, leading spokesman for the ethanol lobby to explain away this one.
Return of the Manchurian Candidate
Who (or what) is the entity inhabiting the body of Ben Bernanke? This Ben Bernanke is a lackey of the administration in power. Taking the lead of his predecessor Alan Greenspan, Bernanke accommodated Bush spending and is now Obama's lackey. Instead of the Fed being the independent monetary policy body envisioned by its founders and codified in the Federal Reserve Act, one would be hard pressed to differentiate between this Fed and a central bank that is an adjunct of the Treasury. The latest example is Bernanke going before Joe Biden's committee for a responsible federal budget. Who is the wag that thought up that name? Just like with most things named in Washington - like legislation - the name has no bearing at all with reality. At his testimony Bernanke did not talk about the irresponsibility of Fed policy but rather supported Treasury's Geithner lie by saying that congress should raise the debt ceiling in order to preserve America's creditworthiness. Certainly he didn't say this with a straight face because he knows it is a lie and assumes that we all are fools. First, as I have pointed out before, not raising the debt ceiling will have no impact on the ability of the US to repay its debts. Revenues are sufficient to do that. Not raising the debt ceiling will simply limit the amount of new spending that the government can conduct. Thus Bernanke is assuming that the congress is made up of a bunch of fools. Actually, he may be right on that score. Second, Bernanke (or the Bernanke body double) is assuming that the rest of the world are fools. The damage to the dollar that the Fed under Greenspan and Bernanke in monetizing the debt is the culprit. Yet this Bernanke look alike says not raising the debt ceiling will "create fundamental doubts about the creditworthiness of the United States, and damage the special role of the dollar and Treasury securities in global markets in the long term." But this Ben-like-person, has already done this along with the rest of the Open Market Committee. Raising or not raising the debt ceiling will have no effect at all on creditworthiness. Eve if the debt ceiling were raised, why should the world keep buying American debt if the dollar keeps being devalued by Fed policy? Who would do this? A fool.
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