No Treason

Another rambling, indirect, wasteful performance today by Ron Paul.  He gets 5 minutes to question Geithner, and should have asked him about his comments to the CFR regarding the dollar, or any of the hundred other pressing issues of the day, but instead he has another ad lib ramble about innocent until proven guilty, which Geithner easily evades without saying anything meaningful.

I don’t even know why Lew Rockwell links to this stuff, because Ron has been off a lot more than he has been on lately.  Would it kill him to make a forceful prepared statement Daniel Hannan style?

The other day, Paul defended his style of questioning, I think it was on Glen Beck.  That wasn’t convincing either.  We can all get all of the Ron Paul opinion time we want on the ‘net.  He has published books, he has his Texas Straight talk, he gives speeches on the house floor, he’s on TV a couple times a week.

But when he gets a few minutes to challenge those in power, he turns into an ideologue and a wallflower and it is immensely frustrating.

Bill Anderson on the LRC blog writes,

Lew, as I watch that video, it dawns on me that Ron Paul might as well be speaking Ancient Greek to Geithner (emphasis mine). Most people in Washington have no clue as to what he means about delegation of powers, or what we have called the “Non-delegation Clause” of the U.S. Constitution.

And that is the point.  Because Ron chooses not to properly prepare and goes off on esoteric tangents, he comes off as speaking in Greek, and the clever bureaucrats play dumb and can avoid answering him.  Ron is not speaking to a friendly audience where he can deliver the same lines and stories over and over, but he’s there as an investigator and an interrogator.

I appreciate everything Ron Paul has exposed me to, and his personal sacrifices to further liberty, but it’s not hard to see how a guy can be punchless in the Congress for so long, when he just can’t ask a few direct questions, and insists upon going on and on about abstract moral and ethical issues that don’t even relate to the hearings.

What a wasted opportunity.  And opportunities are so few they can’t be squandered so carelessly.

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On the most recent post at NoState at the time of this writing, Elitist stupidity, I commented about how the story of Mike’s past employment struggles related to my own observations about intelligent people who lose the plot to confirmation bias and forget about what made them successful.

Mike termed it elitism, but it’s not the exclusive domain of elites to do this.  It is very human to believe your own press and to assume that past performance is predictive of future profit.  We take our relationships for granted, we take our jobs, careers for granted amongst other things.  Part of this is that we rely heavily on observation, which eventually becomes an avalanche, burying critical thinking as entropy increases.

The other part is that success is like a drug, changing our perspective.  Failure qualifies as well, but we don’t usually lament the irrationality of people who fail because their failure already discounts their opinions.

Continue reading Confirmation Bias

With all of the nonsense going on, particularly from progressive liberal quarters that Obama’s bills are necessary, last night I couldn’t help but picture Obama, Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi casting incantations over scraps of parchment, sprinkling dried toad and sulphur over blue flames, and the masses, gathered outside the window of the castle laboratory, straining their necks upwards, waiting for lightning bolts and signs of nature’s forces mustering.

That’s what the ignorant masses regard legislation as today.  Spell casting.

With this stimulus bill, we will create WEALTH!  With this budget, we will create PROSPERITY!  Keynesianism is synonymous with black magic.  When Bush did it, he kept the secret power spells hidden, but Obama and Pelosi have brought out the tomes of forbidden knowledge, for the good of mankind!

Abra cadabra!  Poof! Magic!

Flaherty says G7 agree to avoid protectionism

This is proof that if you give politicians enough power, money and time, they will eventually figure out what the rest of us know.