Flailing Around In Washington

IF THINGS weren’t bad enough, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) isn’t making things any better. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is careful to post an item about the author of the banking crisis, Friend-of-Angelo Chris Dodd, every day.

On Friday, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., mouthed off that the government might have to nationalize some big banks. Such a move would clean out investors, and investors reacted accordingly.

If you read the late great Michael Kelly’s essay “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks” in Things Worth Fighting For you learn that back in the 1980s Senator Chris Dodd was not reading up learned tomes on credit and banking, diligently preparing for the chairmanship of the Senate Banking Committee. No, he was getting roaring drunk at La Brasserie with Ted Kennedy.

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk, too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.)

I could go on, but I won’t.

What this country needs is a lot less of the political elite grabbing on the wheel of state, and a lot more power and responsibility devolved to ordinary businessmen and ordinary consumers. For over a century, the Progressives and their heirs the liberals have been “calling the big shots” on everything from banking to health care to education to welfare and the results are in. They screwed up.

America needs a system that doesn’t depend on wise men in Congress or the bureaucracy or the Treasury or the Federal Reserve. There’s a reason for that. The wise men don’t have a clue.

We need an economy that’s a lot less about debt and a lot more about equity.
We need a politics that’s a lot less about patronage and federal dollars and a lot more about setting rules for everyone to honor.
We need a culture that’s a lot less about personal creativity and a lot more about creative thinking about what we can do for other people.

The world isn’t a global village. It can’t be run by the village Big Man ordering around his deferential villagers.

The world is an organism. It runs according to ideas and notions that we hardly grasp. That’s why we need to be conservative about the powers we loose into the world, and we need to be especially careful about the powers we give to politicians.

Hey, there’s a concept. How about a greater separation of powers between the economic sector, the poliltical sector, and the moral/cultural sector! Then we could keep politicians in their place, bankers in their place, and moralists in their place.

That would at least be better than the Amateur Hour running right now in Washington DC.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.