Wagging the Dog

The President must have it out for me, I mean I can’t speak for the American people but I sure don’t like the idea of wage stagnation for the next twenty years. In twenty years that the average American will be making exactly what their grandparents made. For those who don’t know the average American now is making as much as the average American made in 1988. Oh and the average was getting better because policies enacted back then stymied government growth to a pace so that it didn’t impede with private growth. This policy of an economic parallax where government was in the background but always present made for what can only be called the roaring 90’s. What ended that was when government no longer recognized how easily it could derail the American financial train and then individuals convinced others of their wonderful ideas.

Milton Friedman observed of the individuals behind how bad policy comes into play that there are two kinds; the kind who has noble intentions and the kind who has a special interest in policy. For the layman I’ll put it like this respectively you have the useful idiot and the bad guy aka the conman in a cheap suit. Many people in congress bought into the idea that every American should have a home of their own; the sweet language was more precisely that all Americans should be able to pursue the American Dream. The one who used the line was Bill Clinton and for that he became the darling of the little guy, he could do no wrong. The Congress was convinced by other Congressmen that were of the special interest group and while few did object the end results speak for themselves in 2008.

Now let’s not fool ourselves, everyone knew the housing bubble was going to happen from as early as 2003, and it was very clear to even the average Joe like me by 2005 sadly  no one in government had the courage to raise the issue. And here we come to it, why didn’t Bush do something, anything, an executive action let’s say? The answer is because he couldn’t so my eyes my scrutiny falls the failure of the Republican and Democrat Congress since both had their shot to stop it between the Clinton and Bush administrations.  2008 was caused by Clinton and his special interest cronies like Andrew Cuomo, Fanny and Freddie and so on as well as senators and congressmen but not by the President Bush, the law was passed all he could do was enforce it, Clinton was the one who could have vetoed it.

Bush doesn’t get off scot-free here though, he could have taken the law to the courts, maybe they could have issued an injunction until they reviewed the constitutionality of taking tax dollars to pay for mortgages by giving tax dollars to private companies: there is a constitutional issue there.

Now we look at the modern day President and I’m certain he has it out for me, where Clinton at least pretended that he wanted to help me but was really just lining his pocket and securing his families future at my expense it felt alright because I knew I was conned, I could look out for that next time. Bush I hold no grudge against because he was just doing his job but he didn’t try hard enough in my opinion to do the right thing. Now we have a President that wants to hurt me maybe worse than Clinton has since he is responsible for the average wages falling back to 1988 levels. This President who has two years left in office and has just signed a piece of fiat that says essentially American Citizens are not even worth the 1988 values of what we are being paid. There is a federal minimum wage though and that’s where this is going, because the only thing that can offset minimum wage increases is inflation and inflation makes the point moot. I’m sorry I skipped a step, by making legal so many people over night the President has created an issue for the minimum wage since average wages for the common man are about to take a nice dip. He will then be able to blame Republicans for it for the next two years because anyone with common sense knows money doesn’t grow on trees and printing money will only result in a Weimar Republic repeat with the American Republic… just so we are all on the same page, after that there was another world war.

Constitutionally there needs to be an office of the President, but I have concluded that that office holds much too much power for one man; this isn’t a particular problem with the constitution because the amount of power the President’s office has vacuumed is unconstitutional. The issue is that historically Congress when met with a President of the Jacksonian or Lincoln-ian type is supposed to reassert itself. Grave things happen when Presidents run amuck, for example reader, grant me an open mind with regards to that history is written by the victor and so when I say that the Civil War was a result of executive overreach your sensibilities should flare but I beg you to hold  off on your first reaction… You know what; I’ll do a throat clearing: I do not agree with any form of enslavement and I also don’t distinguish between individuals based on race, I do however generalize individuals based on culture, and that is surmised usually based on nationality, history and actions.

There are news agencies that will say well past precedence shows that the President is within his power to do rewrite law for a crisis like immigration. Some of the issues this brings up are then what isn’t a crisis, something is always a crisis to someone somewhere and another issue is of course he has past precedence to do a lot of things but that doesn’t mean it’s constitutional. If we ran society that way then all someone would have to do is murder someone in a new way then get away with it then the next time someone murders someone that way it’s okay because the last guy got away with it.

Back to the point if Congress had intervened on constitutional grounds in Lincoln’s time then an argument could be made that there would never have been a civil war, instead the majority went along with it. There are just too many angles to show here; the whites of the south that wanted no war the whites in the north that were worse than slavers and vice versa are just examples of the contextual complexity here. But in the end there was war because Congress failed to represent the people. The thing about megalomaniacs and dictator types is that they really don’t recognize that they are megalomaniacs and can rationalize dictator like actions. Lincoln for example gave the game away in his Gettysburg address when he said that government was “of the people, for the people and by the people.” If that were true then why was there a Civil War, it was a demagogues line; it’s as the saying goes the tail is wagging the dog.

To me these are truths about Lincoln but people tend to remember him better, I don’t know why, oh wait that’s right, he was a champion of the little guy so he could do no wrong. In the end Lincoln created a vacuum a hundred times greater than anything Jackson attempted and he killed over five hundred thousand people to make it happen. The thing is unlike with Jackson Congress never moved to plug the vacuum and a now seven score and nine years later we have a President that not only is wagging us but is taking us for a long walk off a short pier. My opponents on these issues spend so much time rooting for the underdog, I think it’s time they realize there is no audience in life and they need to start rooting for themselves.