Reno Hayek Symposium

Sowell hits the nail on the head on the AIG bonus brouhaha: it’s really a duplicitous defense for Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. Of course our  publicity seeking, come-to-me-for-everything president poured a lot of gasoline on the fire which may indeed cause a backfire.

Rep. Barney Frank has threatened to summon these executives before his committee and force them to reveal their home addresses — which would of course put their wives and children at the mercy of whatever kooks might want to literally take a shot at them.

Whatever the political or economic issues involved, this is not the way such issues should be resolved in America. We are not yet a banana republic, though that is the direction in which some of our politicians are taking us — especially those politicians who make a lot of noise about “compassion” and “social justice.”

What makes this all the more painfully ironic is that it is precisely those members of Congress who have had the most to do with creating the risks that led to the current economic crisis who are making the most noise against others, and summoning people before their committee to be browbeaten and humiliated on nationwide television.

No one pushed harder than Barney Frank to force banks and other financial institutions to reduce their mortgage-lending standards in order to meet government-set goals for more home ownership. Those lower mortgage-lending standards are at the heart of the increased riskiness of the mortgage market and of the collapse of Wall Street securities based on those risky mortgages.

Sen. Christopher Dodd has played the same role in the Senate as Barney Frank played in the House of Representatives. Now both are summoning government employees and the officials of financial institutions before their committees to be lambasted in front of the media.

Dodd and Frank know that the best defense is a good offense. Both know how hard it would be to defend their own roles in the housing debacle, so they go on the offensive against others who are in no position to reply in kind, given the vindictive powers of Congress.

This political theater is in one sense cheap beyond words. In another sense, it is costly beyond words.

It is cheap because the politicians who are creating this distraction from their own role also voted for the very legislation that enabled contracted bonuses to be paid by companies like AIG that received government bailout money. If members of Congress can’t be bothered to read the laws they pass, then they have no basis for whipping up lynch-mob outrage against people who did read the law and acted within the law.

via Bad Actors by Thomas Sowell on National Review Online.

Come to think of it, there isn’t a day that I haven’s seen BHO on TV. He must be addicted!

Tom Motherway