What’s Wrong with Picking Winners and Losers?

Reuters.com has a piece discussing how former Governor Willard Romney apparently targeted some industries and business for relocation to and success in Massachusetts. See the informative article here.

Mr. Romney and the Republicans have criticized President Obama for picking alternative energy favorites such as Solyndra. Should government target certain companies for success? How about industries? Should broadband receive favored treatment versus agriculture? Should promotion of commerce be defined by providing incentives for favored firms?

Or should government focus on making sure infrastructure is in place to attract and channel commerce. Instead of betting on whether company XYZ will succeed, government can focus on determining what upgrades in education and facilities it will need in order to attract the private sector. Does that sound like a more reasonable bet to make?

Is Level of Obama Direct Investment in Energy Companies Appropriate

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Marc Thiessen raises an issue with President Barack Obama’s public equity record. By public equity, Mr. Thiessen is describing questionable loan guarantees and direct grants made to a number of private firms, mostly alternative energy firms. Mr. Thiessen’ primary issue is that with taxpayer dollars, Mr. Obama has invested in a crapshoot, with a number of these companies going bankrupt or otherwise failing to perform.

Are loan guarantees and direct grants by government poor uses of government funds? Has government stepped out of the “investing in infrastructure” box and given ammunition to detractors like the Tea Party who argue in essence that the Obama Administration is pursuing a command-and-control type of economy?

The Administration’s penchant for ownership in private going concerns has gone too far. Contracting out to private parties to build the conduits through which our goods and services travel is one thing. Playing private equity or venture capitalist is quite another.

What do you think?

So How Well Will Your Guy Execute the Oath of POTUS

Any analysis of how well a president has done or is expected to do in office should begin with the following:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Whether the guy ate dog as a kid or tied his dog to the roof of a car is not important. His wealth should have no bearing on his ability to execute his oath. We shouldn’t care if his wife is beautiful (yes, it took all I could to admit that one), nor should we care that his wife never filled out a W-4 in her adult life.

We shouldn’t care if he is an uptight white guy who is eligible for AARP and social security. We definitely shouldn’t be about re-electing him because the brother has swag (even though ten percent of black people don’t think Obama is black …go figure)

The issue is, has he, or does he have the ability to execute the oath of office.

If you can make a reasoned argument one way or the other, you’ve earned access to the ballot box. If not, stay home.

Mittens Hasn’t Made the Winning Argument Yet

The New York Times’ David Brooks wrote a piece about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital and how private equity has been benefiting American business and the economy for the past forty years. I think Mr. Brooks did a better job at explaining old Mitten’s experience and the concept of private equity much better than the presumptive GOP candidate has.

Mitt Romney’s problem is that he hasn’t educated the American public on what he did at Bain and how that experience can be beneficial to government and the economy. All he does is assert that he knows the economy because he was in the private sector. That’s not good enough.

Being able to run valuations and wine and dine loan officers into lending you money to buy a fixer upper isn’t exactly economic management 101. The economy is about managing our resources so that we, as a collective, are prosperous. Analyzing Mittens under this framework, I can only conclude that he hasn’t sold me on economic management acumen.

Not to say Barack Obama is any better, but if you are the contender, you have to do more than throw a few jabs. You go for the knockout.

Are You Black Enough?

Great article. The answer impacts how some members of the African American community actually vote. Too bad we subject ourselves to borders built on dogma.

Are You Black Enough?.

You Can’t Eat Books

Americans yearn for a political economy that structures government to serve its real world needs; needs like internal and external security and the ability to take their labor, skills, and knowledge into the market and create income so that they can feed their families.

My daddy, the original Alton Drew, used to say you can’t eat books. He was right, which is why the over intellectualizing from the left and their focus on silly issues like saving the snowy owl gets on the last nerves of millions of Americans. Not that the right does any better with its cheap skate position on austerity. A society can’t grow unless it invests.

Time for a third way….and a no-party system.

On Equality

Political equality, the right to vote every two years or whine at a council meeting is not true equality. True equality requires each person having control over the means to produce, distribute, and sell ones output on an independent basis. What this means is that Americans have been chasing a concept that has been successfully eluding them since right after the Civil War as the country became industrialized. The real issue is how to get Americans to stop looking at production with a balkanized mindset and incorporate into our mindsets the ownership of the production process. Any other approach to equality is a frustrating fairy tale …

Obama opens a Cultural War Issue

Mr. Obama made a personal statement on gay marriage today. I understand his evolution. It took me 16 years and meeting a great professor in law school to change my personal views on same-sex marriage. Politically, however, his statement is a waste of political capital, putting Mr. Obama in that cultural war box, a box he doesn’t need to be in.

Congress Needs to Man Up and Stop Blaming the Federal Reserve

There is an interesting post in The Wall Street Journal where Congress is blaming Federal Reserve rate policies for Congress’ shirking of its job creating responsibilities.

Really? It’s the Federal Reserve’s fault that Congress has been shirking its responsibilities? Come on. The Constitution places responsibility for regulating the flow of commerce on Congress. Congress has been shirking its responsibilities for decades, passing them off on the Executive Branch since it first passed the Employment Act in 1946 and amended it in 1978.

No matter what interest rate policies the Fed puts in place, it can’t stop the Congress from implementing its number one job creation policy: changes in the tax code. The real issue is, how effective is fiscal policy when it comes to stirring aggregate demand. Not very effective.

Hungry for More Than Rhetoric

Politicians reap what they sow when it comes to their false promises on the economy. One of the biggest promises they make to Americans is to place a garage in every car and a chicken in every pot. We know that is impossible, but they put it out there anyway.

What’s telling is when they are caught in traps created by those words. President Barack Obama learned this the hard way. Mr. Obama took advantage of the meltdown in the financial markets in the fall of 2008 to power past a clueless John McCain. Mr. McCain admitted on not being up to speed on matters of the economy, uttering the words that would ultimately seal his political doom, “The economy is fundamentally sound”.

Mr. Obama cited monthly job losses and the employment rate to argue differently. He termed it the worst recession since the Great Depression. He said he could get us on the right track; that we would see job creation.

In short the results have been luke-warm, and this far into the silly season, Mr. Obama need not concentrate on policies that do not have a snowball’s chance in hell on passing.

Not to say that Mr. Romney is doing any better. Arguably he is doing worse. While he takes every opportunity to roundly criticize Mr. Obama for his failures, the Harvard MBA-JD has yet to lay out a clear, cogent plan for turning around the country’s economic state.

Do I expect either man to lay out a plan for the economy? No. That’s because neither man knows what an economy is.