3 Jul 2009

Afghanistan: Still Moving Sideways

Posted by Mr. Roach under USMC, afghanistan, counterinsurgency, marines
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The US Marines are undetaking a huge offensive in Afghanistan. It appears to be a regimental size operation.  I wish them well.  But isn’t this an anachronism, not so different from the Dewey Canyon and Junction City “sweep and clear” operations so favored by General Westmoreland in Vietnam?

Until now, it appears that Generals Petraeus and Matthis successfully disseminated the ethos that the more useful undertakings of counterinsurgency are the not-terribly-glamorous “small unit actions,” providing security to locals, and the work of advisory teams.  A regiment or more can easily sweep through a valley, secure some arms caches, and disrupt the enemy . . .  no doubt.  But it must stay, focusing less on killing the enemy and more on protecting the populace and spreading the government’s message ultimately to succeed.  And this technique must be done everywhere, or we’ll end up playing whack-a-mole as our forces did in Iraq from 2005-2007, when each new big sweep sucked up forces from quiet sectors in turn creating problems in those areas left under-policed.  To break it down as simply as possible:  counterinsurgency warfare is a big popularity contest.

There’s some big problems that this latest sweep-and-clear will not solve.  First, it’s not so clear what the Afghan government stands for.  Second, the population’s fortunes have become intertwined with the drug trade.  What these farmers could do that is equally lucrative is not so clear.  And no American-supported regime could easily look the other way on this issue.  And finally, there’s not enough troops.  There were not enough yesterday, and there won’t be enough tomorrow or the next day.  There won’t be even if they are tripled.

Right now we have 48,000 troops in Afghanistan.  It’s a huge, mountainous country that requires tons and tons of troops (ours and Afghani) to control while protecting the populace.  The Soviets had some 150,000 at their height of Afghan operations.  We had 160,000 in Iraq until recently.  The French had 400,000 or more in Algeria.  We had over 1,000,000 in the height of US involvement in Vietnam (where the counterinsurgency piece finally began to take effect under Abrams).

It takes a lot of troops to do all the things that need to be done in a counterinsurgency, the chief of which is to protect the populace and impress them that the government is worth supporting.  Rumsfeld never understood this, and that’s why our forces were so thinly spread in Iraq and Afghanistan.  He diagnosed the Soviet error in Afghanistan as “too many troops,” somehow missing their godless ideology and penchant for indiscriminate attacks on Afghan villages in his analysis.  So he figured, fewer troops, less frictions, and happier people.  It turned out to be totally wrong.

On top of all these tactical considerations, we should also ask:  What’s the big picture strategic reason we are even in Afghanistan?  If terrorists coalesce, could we not bomb them?  Are we just there out of inertia, some blood-lust for Osama bin Laden?  The latter does not appear terribly capable of doing anything to us any more.  It’s not so clear anything like what prevailed in the 90s could easily reemerge in Afghanistan, threatening America with another 9/11.  The Taliban’s goals are local and prosaic:  imposing Islam, oppressing people, and looking inward.  Al Qaeda is on the run and hiding.  They are impotent, and it seems we should aim instead to disentangle ourselves from this stone age ruin, free up our forces, and seek instead to engage al Qaeda there (and anywhere else they might appear) from arms length, with small special forces units, air power, and a goal of destruction-on-sight rather than the more elusive and overly ambitious goal of  “draining the swamp” by turning Afghanistan into a peaceful, democratic regime.

Indeed, a smaller footprint may aid us in keeping the support of Pakistan’s more moderate (i.e., not inclined to nuke us) elements.  As it stands, we piss a lot of nationalist Afghani and Pakistani people off by being in the neighborhood and killing so many civilians–this too an artifact of insufficient troops, excessive concern for force protection, and a related reliance on technology and air power in what should be a more granular and surgical exercise in counterinsurgency.

The whole idea that we must invade, occupy, democratize, and police Muslim lands because of terrorist attacks that met us because of our rickety border-protection strikes me as akin to the 1960s view that crime could only be fought with extensive anti-poverty efforts in the inner city.  In reality, cops, jails, and gated communities in the suburbs did most of the trick.   The most cost-effective means of addressing certain persistent problems is not to attack “root causes”–a technique which is both expensive and not terribly effective– but instead to address symptoms as they appear.  We now know that jails, cops, long sentences, and the like did a lot more to combat crime than “urban renewal” ever did.  In the case of terrorists, it may mean letting these countries fester, monitoring them as much as possible with our intelligence sources, keeping our borders secure, and bombing training camps and nation-state sponsors of terrorism vigorously as they reveal themselves.   This approach certainly beats the Bush-Obama policy of decades-long occupations of the world’s hell holes with very little to show for it.

 

3 Jul 2009

Obama’s Latin American Policy

Posted by Mr. Roach under Honduras, Zelaya, obama
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Unlike other interventionist-oriented conservatives, I’ve not gotten behind the efforts to have America back Mousavi, a radical Islamist opponent of the radical Islamist regime in Iran.  Such infighting is too complicated and the results too likely to be distasteful for any postive outcome to happen from taking such sides where we will not do anything to support one side or the other and can’t be sure which is better from the standpoint of U.S. interests.

For many of the same reasons, I don’t think we should be taking sides in Honduras, as Obama has done.  The Cold War is over; most of what happens in Latin America should be the business of Latin Americans.  Beyond taking sides, Obama has taken the wrong side.  The Honduran Supreme Court, their unanimous legislature (including the President’s party), and the army have undertaken what is the very opposite of coup, but rather an anti-coup.  It is an anti-coup because, while it involves military force, it is directed by court order and civilian authorities against a would-be caudillo in the mold of Bolivar, Chavez, Castro, and Allende.  Zelaya’s efforts to stop the very sensible constitutional measure in Honduras limiting presidential terms is not so different from similar efforts undertaken by Chavez and successful efforts along these lines by Castro.

Why does Obama support these losers?

Obama looks at the Cold War as an immoral and short-sighted series of policies where the US got behind thugs for self-interested reasons and thereby alienated the Latin American people.   He went to school in the early 80s, where “US Out of El Salvador” and similar rallying cries evidenced a great deal of moral confusion in the allegedly less complex moral world of the Cold War.  Before and during the Cold War, the Latin American model historically tends to be one of extremes and the absence of the rule of law; until recently, the choice has been either left-wing or right-wing thuggery. The democratic regimes of Brazil, Venezulea, Bolivia, and now Honduras are again threatened by the allure of the populist strong man acting above the constraints of law to express the “true will of the people.”

The Latin American situation is different from Iran in important ways. The US has intervened more often there, so perhaps it made sense for Obama to specify the US was not behind the coup.  But this is no reason to get behind Zelaya and support his restoration.  It was he who ignored the Honduras Supreme Court and acted lawlessly.  It was he and not the short-term emergency that threatens the long-term political health of Honduras.  Simply because the military is involved, does not a coup make.  Law ultimately comes down to force; whether we are seeing the police or military, both are arms of the state, and in this case were acting under the aegis of lawful orders by the authorities.

It would be a great shame if the US, which honorably stood behind the Nicaraguan Contras, stood up for Cuban refugees, adopted a sensibly netural stance in Argentina during the Falklands War, and supported but tempored Chile’s Pinochet, became the “yes man” to the recurrding dead-end in Latin American politics:  the lawless, populist, strong-man.  Obama’s anti-imperialist holdover views from the Cold War blind him to the indigenous evils that arise in other lands.  The talk of “fighting for the people” blinds him to the deeper realities and dead-ends of Latin American history.  What seems like a morally simple case at first glance is more complicated and, in the case of Honduras as with Chile, may be a necessary evil that will soon pass, unlike the more persistent alternative.

 

28 Jun 2009

Billy Mays, RIP

Posted by Mr. Roach under Billy Mays, Oxy Clean, Television Advertising
1 Comment 

I’ve been a big fan of pitchman Billy Mays’ schtick for a long time. I like that he doesn’t make any bones about it: he was trying to sell you something. His old school ads contrast sharply with the more muted “lifestyle” commercials, such as the car ads where you feel like you’re on a safari instead of being told why a car is worth buying. His pitch-perfect pitches also were unusually sophisticated if you listened closely, using emotionally evocative words and parallel construction to stress the benefits of his products. And his delivery was slightly ethnic and regional and very masculine compared to the more anodyne tones of TV News or more traditional commercials.  To me, this increased his credibility and it shows:   Billy Mays single-handedly propelled products like Orange Glo and Oxy Clean to success.

He lived down the road in Tampa and was a regular guy who made it where he was through the power of his own voice and his gift for pitching products. He’ll be missed.

 

28 Jun 2009

Gov. Mark Sanford Scandal

Posted by Mr. Roach under Jenny Sanford, Mark Sanford, Republican Party
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I’ve not followed the Sanford story too closely. I don’t expect much from politicians, he’s not my governor, and it sounds about as typical as any other polticial sex scandal. I was impressed, however, with Gov. Sanford’s wife, Jenny Sanford, who did not participate in her own abuse and humiliation by standing by his side during his press conference. Her statement instead made it clear that this is his problem and, while she’s willing and ready to forgive him, her own self-respect and setting the right example for her children comes first. Her dignified response in what is undoubtedly a painful time in her life stands in marked contrast to Eliot Spitzer’s use of his wife as a prop during his press conference admitting his penchant for whoring around.

 

28 Jun 2009

Obama’s Health Bill

Posted by Mr. Roach under Economics, Health Care, Medicaid, Medicare, Socialism, obama
1 Comment 

Medicare and Medicaid are hemorrhaging money. The biggest reason health care costs are constantly rising is that most of the price pressure is not felt by the consumers in the case of both the judgment-proof poor people who use emergency rooms without paying or the well-insured employed who pay small co-pays.

This situation has persisted for decades ever since benefits of all kinds were used during WWII to get around wage controls and have not been taxed as income ever since. Any restoration of cost controls in health care must bring the costs to the consumer, who are quite capable of economizing in every other area of life whether shoes, food, clothes, or housing when they must bear the lion’s share of the cost. In those areas of health care that are market driven–such as LASIK–costs come down over time and access is expanded. The same progress whereby luxuries become necessities works just fine in health care, so long as markets are allowed to work.

Even in a perfect world, it’s not so obvious why an advanced economy such as ours would not have expanded percentage of the economy spent on health care. As an economy develops, various luxuries like appliances, air conditioning, cars, etc. become more widely diffused as they become more affordable. Once those perceived minimum material requirements are met, why wouldn’t we expect people to spend a lot simply to prolong the time and energy with which they can enjoy those already-bought material goods?

Obama sometime suggests digitizing medical records will reduce medical costs and reduce medical errors. This is probably true, but it has nothing to do with the socializing ideas he wants to impose, such as subsidized insurance. What makes no sense with Obama’s plan is the notion that expanding the entitlement to insurance is somehow supposed to reduce costs. Insured people consume more health care. They particularly use more late in life when they bear no cost at all under Medicare, and the marginal utility of these public monies at their death is, for them, zero.

Reducing costs while expanding insurance will be impossible without severe rationing. Such rationing might make sense, but unlike a market regime, consumers may have little opportunity to spend their own dollars directly on health care outside the system, as is the case in such locales as Belgium or Canada. This is un-American and will occasion much grumbling, as too will the prospect of government bureaucrats prolonging wait times, cutting off access to “luxury” and lifestyle medicines and procedures, and other measures imposed to control costs.

Politically, however, this likely is a net advantage for Democrats and that’s why they’ve pushed it for so long. Wealthier people are healthier people, but they’ll spend much more than the actuarial tables dictate in order to finance the loose-living and more physically dangerous lifestyles of the poor (something they and all other insured do now) without the corresponding benefit of higher quality care. At the same time, with a significant government role in health care, every election will be a debate about generosity for the middle class. Republicans can’t win that game, and, as with Medicare and Medicaid, this will be one more nail in the coffin of fiscal responsibility, the spirit of independence among the middle class, and the prospect of constitutionally limited government.

 

22 Jun 2009

More Skepticism on Iran’s “Green Revolution”

Posted by Mr. Roach under Ahmadinejad, French Revolution, Green Revolution, Iran, Mousavi, democracy, islam
[2] Comments 

When I heard the events in Iran were the “Green Revolution,” I was very skeptical. Green is the color of political Islam. It’s the dominant color on the flag of Saudi Arabia and the headbands of Hezzbollah. It’s bad enough these color revolutions are supposed to capture our imagination without occasioning much in the way of inquiry. But a green one in Iran?!?

I’m glad I’m not alone. Abbas Barzegar notes that Ajad probably won the election, and mass demonstrations have been had by both sides. In other words, don’t believe the hype.

Diana West shares my view that Mousavi’s tenure as Iran’ prime minister in the 1980s were not exactly the country’s salad days, particularly from the perspective of the US. I know, I know. It’s democracy! It’s people power! What’s 241 Marines killed in Lebanon when we’re talking about people with faux hawks using Twitter!!! West reports to great effect that in the recent presidential debate in Iran–a first–the supposedly great guy Mousavi faulted Ajad for not executing the British sailors that supposedly drifted into Iranian waters. Be careful what you wish for.

Richard Spencer over at Takimag.com notes that the neoconservatives’ romantic passion for democratic revolution is totally immune to facts and recent events in Iraq among others. It’s a very adolescent and distinctly unconservative impulse that gets carried away by street demonstrations and does not consider what in fact is being sought. Burke’s central and important insight was that change can make things even worse in what is presently a bad regime. Consider the demonic French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the pointless street violence in France every generation or so. This situation is particularly galling because no matter who wins, this is a stolen election because the Islamic authorities must preapprove parties and candidates to even run in Iran.

The whole event, particularly the credulous western response, is surreal. It’s a sign of the way Bush has corrupted conservatism that so many self-described conservatives now think that democracy in the Third World is the be all end all without regard to the content of the leadership or the nature of their claims to legitimacy. It’s as if we’re getting excited by some election in the Soviet Union as a watersheld, where minor issues of emphasis and personality were the only real objects of debate, and such elections (even if hotly disputed) were effectively meaningless.

 

16 Jun 2009

The Neocon Right Swoons for Iran

Posted by Mr. Roach under Iran, Mousavi, Neocons, democracy
[8] Comments 

There is a ritual every few years–it was Ukraine first, then Lebanon, then Georgia–where the stirrings of a mass movement in some Third World dump reminds the neocon right of the moral clarity of the Cold War, where nationalists and popular movements such as Poland’s Solidarity were brutally supressed by communist regimes and their security apparatus. In those times, the moral example of the defiant people remained an inspiration to us all and a reminder of the indefatigable human spirit. Today we’re supposed to be seeing that in Iran.

I can’t get too pumped about what’s going on in Iran. Perhaps on balance Mousavi would be better for the United States and the Iranian people. It’s hard to say. But lots of angry people in the streets does not mean he’s a great guy with a great plan to support a more liberal and decent regime in Iran. Muqtadr al Sadr used to get the crowds out too. Indeed, so did Khomenei. It’s just as likely, considering the people and history involved, Mousavi would spend much of his energy oppressing his erstwhile oppressors if elected. This is the way politics runs in the Third World.

We are talking about an Islamic poltical party in an Islamic state. Almost no one talks about how Mousavi ran the show in Iran in the 1980s as Prime Minister when Iran was America’s mortal enemy, and his track record then–when Iran was supporting kidnappings of Americans in Lebanon and attacks on US ships in the Gulf–is chiefly why the Iranians like him. Why should we think his vague anti-corruption platform means we’ll have a friendly regime there? Why do neocons lose their judgment every time some “color revolution” comes down the pike?

I view events in Iran no so differently from the elections in Iraq. Even though the elections were fairly run in Iraq (which may not have happened in Iran, but I can’t be sure unlike so many breathless commentators), nearly everyone voted for sectarian parties in Iraq and also in Iran. It’s Saddam vs. Sadr vs. Badr kind of stuff. There’s no reason to get too pumped about who wins in these kinds of elections, because the problem in Iran and Iraq too is not the elections or the lack of them. The problem is the underlying anti-modern, anti-liberal, pro-sharia viewpoint of the electorate that is rooted in the dominant understanding of Islam itself. I don’t see anything Mousavi or any other Iranian politician has said that will reverse that fundamental aspect of Iranian society.

 

12 Jun 2009

Sotomayor the Chauvinist

Posted by Mr. Roach under Affirmative Action, Diversity, Multiculturalism, Sotomayor, Supreme Court
[6] Comments 

Whether it makes for good politics or not to emphasize Sotomayor’s intellectual mediocrity and ethnic chauvinism, I don’t know. But I do find it striking how her entire world view and intellectual interests consists of narcissistic championing of diversity and the “magical Latinal soul,” as detailed by Lawrence Auster in a recent blog entry. I mean, a little ethnic pride is one thing, but the self-obsession with the distinctness of the Latin American experience and the need to justify the unfair advantages she’s been given by affirmative action suggest an oversized, but very fragile ego. This is a human type not so different from the prickly Michelle Obama. (Barack, by contrast, seems much more confident in his intellectual horsepower.)

How sad never to to look outside of oneself and the “Latina experience” and engage the robust heritage of Western Civilization. Can you ever imagine someone like Michelle Obama or Sotomayor reading something about Ancient Greece or modern India or the French Revolution or anything else for that matter? I am not Greek or German or Russian but I have alternately been fascinated by Plato, Kant, and Catherine the Great and, for that matter, the history of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Japan, Vietnam, South Africa, and Chile. Sotomayor’s absorption with her own tribe reminds me of how nearly all the Asian students in college took East Asian CIV and all the Hispanics Latin American CIV. It seemed only the whites dared to learn about sanskrit, hittites, eskimos, ancient Greece, and the like. And, of course, highly educated whites such as those on the federal bench are the only ones who can be publicly and repeatedly insulted, which is why Obama went to his crazy church for so long and why Sotomayor’s speech would be completely unobjectionable in her social circles. The combination of self-obsession and arrogance is typical and costless for affirmative action babies like them.

Auster writes:

Sonia Sotomayor’s 2001 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law reveals a deeply mediocre mind. Reading it is a profoundly depressing experience. Nothing matters to this woman except the wonderfulness of her “Latina” identity and the need to get more people of color and more women on the nation’s federal courts. There is no other aspect of the law, no other aspect of America, no other aspect of the universe that she appears to care about. She evinces not the slightest sign of thoughtfulness, expresses not a single idea that rises above dreary mediocrity or goes beyond the rote repetition of the multicultural party line. Think of the old Communists, how they had no frame of reference outside the toppling of capitalism and no thought in their heads other than Communist slogans. Sotomayor has the same kind of mentality, except that her leftism, instead of being directed at the construction of a Communist state, is directed at the construction and celebration of racial and sexual diversity, and the slogans in her head are all about the richness and “vibrancy” of her “Latina” identity: “My family showed me by their example how wonderful and vibrant life is and how wonderful and magical it is to have a Latina soul.”
It is disgusting to read a 4,000 word talk by a person occupying the high position of U.S. federal appeals court judge who speaks endlessly about herself not as a judge, not as an American, but as a “Latina” woman, boasting about her ethnicity. She appears to be devoid of any sense of American citizenship.

What this woman represents is both the death of the intellect, and the death of the common principles, loves, and loyalties that made America.

I have to commend Auster for reading this entire speech; it’s awful in tone, similar to the orientation week lectures you get from highly indoctrinated resident assistants in college.

That said, it’s notable that while she is a number counter–i.e., she details through how many female and Hispanic judges there are on different federal circuits–her interests and the interests of Hispanic chauvinists in general are not nearly so militant or as distasteful as those of anti-assimilationist Muslims in Europe or extremist black activists at home like Al Sharpton. Her memories are not of major injustices, but of good times spent with family and a distinct cuisine. This has been my personal experience with Hispanics, who are generally friendly and warm people that are not terribly militant or alienated, even if they are left-leaning and want their group to get its “fair share.” As she herself says, “Many of us struggle with this tension and attempt to maintain and promote our cultural and ethnic identities in a society that is often ambivalent about how to deal with its differences. In this time of great debate we must remember that it is not political struggles that create a Latino or Latina identity. I became a Latina by the way I love and the way I live my life.” Well, it could be worse.

 

11 Jun 2009

A Tale of Three Murders

Posted by Mr. Roach under Abdulhakim Muhammad, Arkansas, Bias, Diversity, Media, Muslims, Terrorism, islam
[2] Comments 

When a Kansas abortionist and a Washington DC security guard at the Holocaust Museum were murdered in recent weeks by right-wing wackos–an ardent anti-abortion Missouri “freeman” and a neo-nazi respectively–the cases rightly received extensive news coverage because they were dramatic, unusual, and involve salient social controversies. There is no doubt that in both cases the perpetrators’ extreme, paranoid, and self-certain worldviews had a lot to do with why they did what they did.

It’s also true that other people that hold those views do not commit murder. This proves exactly nothing. Most of the important information in life is probabalistic in nature. There is no doubt that people with strong, uncompromising views of moral and political injustice–particularly when a certain group is viewed as the absolute enemy or absolutely evil–will be more inclined to dramatic political violence. As a consequence, it’s at least not crazy to say that if the rhetoric is extreme enough the government should keep an eye on public source data and monitor committed members of the extremist group.

But another group we are all familiar with that also employs extreme rhetoric. This group has, in fact, murdered thousands in the name of its belief system. It’s fair to describe the group as akin to certain right-wing movements: anti-modern and anti-liberal, combined with a view of violence as proof of commitment.

But this movement is never considered in such terms. It’s, in fact, treated with the utmost respect by the media and various elites. Any criticism of it qua group is treated as unfair stereotyping. In the case of this group, little effort is made to examine the connections of belief to violent action, connections which are patently obvious in the case of anti-abortion extremists and neo-nazi extremists.

At some point a crime by someone who “happens to be ‘X’” becomes “yet another X-motivated crime” or a characteristic crime of “X group” And while there is no bright line when that happens, if the actions in question follows from uncompromising statements about the need for certain kinds of violence by the group’s founders and leaders, we should not engage in back flips to avoid the obvious.

Earlier this week, a US soldier was murdered in broad daylight by someone who considered himself a sincere believer in Islam, following the religious commandment to avenge insults to Muslims and engage in jihad. But you would hardly know this from the national news. They’ve been busy focusing on the much less common domestic, right-wing extremists. And they’ve been avoiding considering the roots of Muslim violence in a widely held interpretation of Islam itself.

Consider the contrast of this lengthy AP wire report about the Arkansas attacks and the much smaller and more anodyne blurb at the NY Times.

Here’s some of what the Times cut out:

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.

Consider what’s implicit in the NY Times’ editing of this wire report. A bunch of agnostics from DC and NY believe they understand Islam better than a guy who spent time in Yemen and changed his name to Abdulhakim Muhammad. The media and various political and academic elites are doing a disservice to our understanding of Islam, and there are implications of that misunderstanding relevant to the war on Islamic terrorism, our immigration policies, and domestic surveillance that should be undertaken of mosques and other Muslim groupings domestically.

The media and other elites buy into the view that our liberal social structure works well with everyone because “people everywhere want the same things,” thus diversity is basically good, and that the Third World and its people are basically victims of the West historically and victims today of “prejudice.” This view runs into conflicts with reality regularly, especially in the case of Islam, whether it is the text of the Koran, atrocities committed in the past and today by Muslims, the anti-modern and totalitarian viewpoint of the most extreme (sincere?) Muslims, and by the relatively strong connections between the content of Islam and the acts of Islamic terrorists.

Now that we have a President talking about Islam being “revealed” on the Arabian peninsula, I don’t see this sorry state of affairs changing any time soon. Failures of analysis and understanding beget failures of imagination about the threats we face as a people.

It’s sometimes objected that these terrorists are not following true Islam. Perhaps. But someone forgot to tell the perpetrators, their leaders, the thousands who cheered the “19 Lions,” and whoever put all that stuff about killing infidels in the Koran.

 

11 Jun 2009

Straight Up Socialism

Posted by Mr. Roach under Compensation, Economy, Financial Crisis, Socialism, obama
1 Comment 

Obama laughed at the suggestion that he was a socialist during the campaign. But the scale of his spending, his intrusion in the private economy, and his disregard for traditional freemarket principles is breathtaking. The latest is a “compensation czar” who will oversee the pay of the many companies the government has subsidized. Pretty soon, I think we’ll all end up on a GS schedule.

This, of course, is the biggest threat of government handouts: in addition to the government picking winners and losers in a way totally inappropriate to a free market system under the rule of law, the principle of independence of private companies and their business decisions is completely undermined. It’s the kind of “help” that smothers the recipient and creates systemwide degradation of the “animal spirits” and cold-hearted market logic on which the whole economy depends.

The latest news reads like something out of Atlas Shrugged:

Administration: Rein in pay across private sector
Obama administration: Executive pay needs curbs, better management, across private sector

In addition, Obama’s likely instincts–cutting salaries–is the wrong one, and he’d know this if he paid attention at the many law and economics lectures that were available while he was at the University of Chicago Law School. I wrote about it here. Salaries are the long-term incentive for corporate managemnet, while options and bonuses of one kind or another are the shorter term regime. The market is already engaging in this correction, though, and, unlike Obama, it has its own money in the game.

 

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