What a SURPRISE!

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Ex,

Ok, now we are getting somewhere.

If you want to create sound policy and be an advocate for anything, "going by your gut" is probably the worst mistake that one can make. The Framers were all students of history and lived in environment of tyranny; they understood what they were doing in a context that few American's realize. However, if you read the minutes and transcripts from the Constitution Convention you would get a feel for this. They wanted to limited Federal Government because they knew it was a beast and needed to keep it in check. Please don't think that allowing the Fed Gov to take more and more control is a good thing.

"Going by your gut" more often than not results in the creation of incentives that run counter to a goal. History provides all kinds of examples: prohibition in the 30's, tax policy from the beginning of time, and on and on. The main problem with the Government as policy maker is that if they are wrong, there typically is no mechanism to fix it. If private health insurance companies are wrong, there are other better run health insurance companies, laws, other industries, that can step in to "right the ship."

You said that you think Obama did the right thing with GM & Chrysler; probably because your gut tells you. It is hard to say exactly what will happen in the long run, however, the damage that he did to the economy, and the individual companies is terrible on a lot of different levels. A couple of quick points: the new companies are still saddled with higher pension costs than all of their competitors; if there were a true bankruptcy, these costs would have been addressed; instead, Obama gave 53% of Chrysler to the pension members! Meanwhile, we stiffed the senior lenders; while this may have satisfied those who think investors should get screwed before the pension members, it has done incalculable damage to the credit markets as investors have no idea what kind of bankruptcy protection they will get in the future. If Obama left it alone, GM & Chrysler would have done what hundreds and thousands of companies have done before them; they would have restructured their debt, worked it all out and they would still be making cars. Obama thinks he helped this company but really he made them less competitive going forward and hurt US manufacturing capacity. The "gut" can be a very tricky thing.





Many policies are created without regard for the