George Will: Ice, Ice Baby

The pen is mightier than the sword. With cold precision, George Will demonstrates just how to wield the mighty pen to lance the heart of an issue. In two different Washington Post Opinion columns, published on two consecutive days, George Will unsheathes his sword to strike a blow at both the bumbling feds and Senator McCain's response to the financial crisis.

In his September 24th article, “Stampede of the Lemmings”, George F. Will warns that “the government's speed should not vary inversely with its information.” Will writes in the Washington Post article entitled “Our Federal Economy”:

Members of Congress are being exhorted to stampede, like lemmings in reverse, away from a postulated cliff. But some of the economic geographers who say they know that the cliff is there, and that the economy will plunge over it if Congress stops to think before empowering the secretary of the Treasury to control the flow of capital through the veins of American capitalism, are some of those experts who said in March that prophylactic federal intervention in the matter of Bear Stearns was necessary to contain the crisis.

Everything that has been done for the past six months has been done to cope with what previous actions were supposed to prevent. A perhaps pertinent axiom: There is no education in the second kick of a mule. The essence of this crisis is lack of knowledge, including the inability to know who owes what to whom, and where risk resides. In such a moment, government's speed should not vary inversely with its
information...Henry Paulson, a.k.a. the Fourth Branch of Government, is intelligent and indefatigable and has as much pertinent experience as could be hoped for. But no one has ever had much experience that is pertinent to the tasks that would be assigned to him by the three-page legislation that would give him almost complete discretion over at least $700 billion.

Before Congress codifies this, it should consult Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." ...

Rep. Barney Frank...says: "No one in a democracy, unelected, should have $800 billion to spend as he sees fit. . . . That's not the way to run a democracy." ...

Read George Will's entire article “Our Federal Economy” here.

Yesterday on September 23rd, Mr. Will took a cold stab at the heart of Senator John McCain's response to the financial crisis. In his article entitled “McCain Loses His Head,” George Will compares McCain with the Queen of Hearts character from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. He even opens his critique with a quote from Lewis Carroll's classic: “The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. 'Off with his head!' she said without even looking around." Oh man, if that weren't cold enough, Will adds:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street...."

...In any case, McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning...

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases."

...Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain's party [Republican] now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?

Read the complete "McCain Loses His Head" article here.

George Will deserves the Ice, Ice Baby Award (Jim Carey-style) for his accurate portrayal of the financial fiasco that we call Wall Street free market capitalism.