Government Is Furiously Dancing the Two-Stepby
Robert Higgs
How do once-free people lose their liberty? The formula may be stated succinctly: crisis and leviathan. Alternatively, and somewhat more fully stated, the procedure for the government officials and their supporters who hope to gain by quashing the people’s liberties is (1) cause a serious crisis, thereby heightening the public’s fears, and (2) blame others for the crisis, pose as the people’s savior, and thereby justify the seizure of new powers allegedly necessary to remedy the crisis and to prevent the recurrence of such crises in the future. This gambit is as old as the hills, yet, given the right ideological preconditions, it works every time. Strange to say, the people never learn (in part because these experiences produce ideological change that fortifies the fiscal and institutional changes the government makes during the crisis). Today’s news brings us a perfect illustration — one of many during the past year of financial debacle and worsening economic recession. According to an AP report, “Treasury Secretary Geithner asked Congress on Tuesday for broad new powers to regulate nonbank financial companies.” Geithner, of course, earnestly expressed the finest motives: “We must ensure that our country never faces this situation again.” Geithner’s partner in crime, Fed chief Ben Bernanke, joined him in “calling for greater governmental authority over complicated and troubled financial companies.” These rulers of the universe want the legal power “to seize control of institutions, take over their bad loans and other illiquid assets and sell good ones to competitors.” (Extra-credit question: haven’t they been taking precisely such actions for the past year or so?)
Since the onset of the current financial troubles, government officials have made repeated use of a new mantra to justify shoveling mega-tons of the taxpayers’ money to favored firms: systemic risk. So, naturally, at today’s hearings, Geithner trotted out this new hobby-horse: “As we have seen with AIG, distress at large, interconnected, non-depository financial institutions can pose systemic risks just as distress at banks can.” But did we really see systemic risk hovering over AIG, or have we merely been told repeatedly that it was hovering? One wonders whether Bernanke and Geithner are also on record as having reported that they have definitely sighted flying saucers.
It’s possible, of course, that some people failed to see what was going on at today’s hearing, because, as usual, all parties tried to throw the bloodhounds off the scent by dragging a red herring across the trail. This time the rotten herring is the $165 million in bonuses that AIG recently attempted to pay certain employees to retain their services. Joe Sixpack got mighty hot under the collar about these bonuses, of course, goaded by the news media’s usual efforts to make their emphasis inversely proportional to an event’s actual importance. Yes, people are furious about the bonuses; these payments are the populist outrage d’jour. People seem not to have noticed, however, that the $165 million scheduled to be paid in AIG bonuses amounts to approximately 0.00002 of the total amount the government has dispensed in its recent commitments for loans, capital infusions, “stimulus” spending, loan guarantees, asset swaps, and other utter (and utterly destructive) wastes. The public might just as well have become inflamed about how Tim Geithner combs his hair. This first appeared in The Beacon.
March 26, 2009
Robert Higgs [send him mail] is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute and editor of The Independent Review. He is also a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His most recent book is Neither Liberty Nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government. He is also the author of Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy, Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 and Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Copyright © 2009 Robert Higgs
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Given
what a manifestly big deal this bureaucratic power-grab appears
to be, why would anyone in Congress want to go along with it? Simple:
failure to hand over these powers to the apparatchiks might result
in the complete destruction of civilization. Speaking of the government’s
having already poured more than $180 billion into AIG, Bernanke
told the House Financial Services Committee that the big insurance
company’s “failure could have resulted in a 1930s-style
global financial and economic meltdown, with catastrophic implications
for production, income and jobs.” You heard him – catastrophic
implications for jobs. That’s all that members of Congress
needed to hear. Faux job creation is their very lifeblood when they
run for reelection.
