By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Did you know that there are more than 6,000 think tanks globally, and about 2,000 in the United States? In the past two weeks, two major rankings of think tanks have been released.
On Dec. 28, the Financial Times announced, "China has again outshone the U.S. as the top venue for initial public offerings." How is it that since 2008, a self-proclaimed communist country raises more capital and has more new firms going public than the great bastion of free-market capitalism, the United States? Answer: Members of Congress have been killing the U.S. financial markets because of hubris, incompetence and a lust for power and money.
Which two have done more to improve your life - Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, or Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi? Some people, in their pursuit of profit, benefit their fellow humans by creating new or better goods and services, and then by employing others. We call such people entrepreneurs and productive workers. Others are parasites who suck the blood and energy away from the productive. Such people are most often found in government.
Want more evidence that many government officials could not care less about protecting our person, property and liberty - which the American Founding Fathers saw as the basic purpose of government? Reports released this past week provided a bumper crop of evidence.
Americans have lost more than $4 trillion in assets since the housing market collapsed in 2006. Risky government mortgage lending regulations helped inflate prices beyond reason, but those policies have not gone away. Instead, they've just moved into a new home, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Unless Congress acts to renovate eligibility requirements for borrowers, we could see an even worse financial disaster unfold.
For instance, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wallison, a former general counsel of the U.S. Treasury, has just written a book explaining, with all the supporting evidence, how a politically inspired, false narrative about the financial crisis led to the destructive Dodd-Frank Act and what corrective action is needed.
In explaining his dissent, Mr. Wallison wrote: "Like Congress and the Obama administration, the Commission's majority erred in assuming that it knew the causes of the financial crisis.
