Category Archives: Regulation

Update II: Akio Toyoda Should Have Sat It Out … At Home

Business, Constitution, Free Markets, IMMIGRATION, Liberty, Multiculturalism, Politics, Regulation, Socialism, Technology, War

Help me understand what hitherto no cable commentator has, and I include the formidable Judge Andrew Napolitano: Under what law or warrant does Congress get to summons Toyota executives for an inquisition? I’m curious.

So too is the “U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seeking documents related to unintended acceleration as well as to Toyota’s disclosure policies and practices,” says this newspaper.

Judge Napoiltano of FoxNews didn’t touch on the legal basis for Congress running interference with Toyota—and even seemed to think the first should put the second on notice.

Shouldn’t the matter of the car manufacturer’s malfunctioning accelerators fall to the courts and those harmed? Shouldn’t the injured parties hammer out a settlement in private or in the courts, rather than before our elected buffoons in Congress?

Personally, if I see one more weak, sobbing American begging for The Regulator and the burdened nation to feel her pain; I’ll explode.

(“Shame on you,” Rhonda Smith, of Sevierville, Tenn., said at a congressional hearing.)

What a nation of spineless crybabies. Get a lawyer, join a class-action lawsuit. Go to Haiti. Cry in private. But spare us your imagined near-death experience as your Lexus got ahead of you.

Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota Motor Corp., ought to have reminded the American political ponces of how many of their countrymen he employs and promised politely to fix his company’s problems.

Moreover, Toyoda could have achieved the brevity much-admired in his culture had he borrowed from that clever commie (and rapier sharp wit) Bernard Shaw, who too was forced to decline an invitation from “a collector of social scalps”:

The House Oversight committee’s invitation to Mr. Toyoda: “We will be sitting between four and six o’clock.”

Toyoda: “Akio Toyoda likewise.”

Update I (Feb. 24): Reader “ryan” echoes my thought exactly. Sean and I were discussing the point “ryan” makes. Only in America, were dumbness is elevated to an art, would a vehicle with an ignition key become a self-propelled lethal weapon.

I drive a 2006 Volkswagen GTI, with a high-tech 200-horsepower, 2.0-liter turbocharged engine. The “pocket rocket” has a spectacularly smooth six-speed manual transmission. (I won’t drive an automatic, never have; never will.) If the gas pedal took on a life of its own, I’d automatically—without even thinking—indicate, take the car off the road, put it in neutral and switch off the ignition.

If you can’t do this small thing, ryan is right: you are the lethal weapon, not the vehicle.

As for the comment postulating that Toyota might be in the business of hoodwinking the American buyer: I remind those who profess their love of freedom and markets that such utterances mean that the Demopublican Regulators are winning.

Toyota would not be in business for as long as it has, producing quality cars, if this was its purpose. The car manufacturer relies for its bread and butter on pleasing consumers, not politicians. Profit? Since when is that anything but a blessing? Profits and prices are the street signs of the economy. Without them there is nothing—no incentive to produce and invent and no signal as to when production must be accelerated or decelerated.

Well-taken too are Robert’s observations about the Japanese. Having just traveled to a mystical city named Nara, to do high-tech, Sean would second that. Modernity has not changed this homogeneous nation’s genteel nature.

“Like, what can I get you guys” is not a refrain you’ll hear in a Japanese restaurant. Sean was taken aback by the gentility and graciousness of the Japanese ladies. Sure, the youth sports all the technological and sartorial trappings; but they respect their elders. This makes for a more refined atmosphere. After all, generational demarcations are necessary to ordered liberty.

If you do the polite thing and bow slightly—no need to touch your toes like this guy does—as you enter an establishment, faces light up and the courtesy is more than returned.

I do believe that the US, a multicultural toilet, is working hard to impress upon the Japanese the need to open up their country to immigration.

Update II: To Haym (and others): The comment (hereunder) is completely off-topic and won’t be further pursued on this post. But I suppose Japanese warriors are not supposed to be as ruthless as their American enemy—also the only power to have ever, in the history of mankind, stooped to nuke innocent civilians. When will Americans apply equal thinking to all sides?!

‘More Government Equals Fewer Jobs’

Debt, Economy, Government, Labor, Regulation, Socialism, Taxation

My own version of the title’s maxim invoked “zero-sum economics, or parasite vs. host. The larger the parasitical sector gets, the weaker the productive host will grow. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second.”

Peter Schiff expertly drives home the principle in his latest column:

“The fiscal 2011 budget proposed by President Obama contains $3.8 trillion in federal spending. Think of government as a cancer feeding off the private sector. The larger it grows, the more jobs it kills. Unfortunately, most politicians follow the misguided advice of economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government spending as a means of job creation. In reality, government spending merely results in government jobs replacing more efficient private sector jobs.”

Read on about the effects of regulation, subsidies and, yes, tax cuts when borrowing continues apace. As they bay for the tax-cuts panacea, I bet beautiful Sarah and her supporters have not figured out that:

“… a dollar borrowed kills more jobs than a dollar taxed. Therefore, cutting taxes and borrowing the shortfall kills more jobs then [sic] it creates. This is true because jobs require capital and government borrowing more directly crowds out private capital investment than taxes do.”

Bush, I noted in “Deficit Disorders,” cut taxes while “spending like there was no tomorrow—for every dollar that may or may not remain with its rightful owner, the president blew tens of non-existent bucks on brand-new spending.” And, “Each of the morally bankrupt parties has used tax cuts as a decoy to avoid addressing the cause of the deficit: government’s spending more than it steals.”

Updated: Obama’s Shocked: More Jobs ‘Lost’

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Debt, Economy, Regulation, Taxation

STATISM AND STUPIDITY ARE INTERCHANGEABLE. “Employers chopped 85,000 jobs last month, and difficulty finding work helped chase more than half a million people out of the job market,” reports the Hartford Courant.

To Obama, this is genuinely surprising. Didn’t he do everything possible to avert such a scenario? Didn’t he do everything right?

Sure, if you consider stupendous spending, the creation of faux industries—“the average cost of alleged new green jobs will be $135,000 per job”—and the taking over of failed ones.

With “the $780 billion stimulus plan,” the prez purports to have saved 1 million jobs, but by Kudlow’s calculations, each cost “roughly $200,000 per job.”

Mr. Midas touch has closed “down federal lands for oil and gas drilling,” opened up more EPA departments for capping-and-trading, is leading a government takeover of health care, and this is barely the beginning of BO’s transformation of “the government’s relation to the private economy.”

Because he is a dyed-in-the-wool statist, BO cannot conceive that by dolling out unemployment benefits, and state aid; launching government jobs programs—all of which necessitate the seizure of private wealth through taxing, borrowing, and printing paper—he is taking a wrecking ball to the job market, and the private economy.

Update (Jan. 9): I think BO is genuinely surprised. Contra Glenn Beck, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I believe in the banality of evil. BO believes in the Keynesian “remedied.” I think he’s scratching his head.

Here’s the mundane truth conspiracies obscure (from the post “On Conspiracy Theories”):

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.
Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold.

Updated: Obama's Shocked: More Jobs 'Lost'

Barack Obama, Conspiracy, Debt, Regulation, Taxation

STATISM AND STUPIDITY ARE INTERCHANGEABLE. “Employers chopped 85,000 jobs last month, and difficulty finding work helped chase more than half a million people out of the job market,” reports the Hartford Courant.

To Obama, this is genuinely surprising. Didn’t he do everything possible to avert such a scenario? Didn’t he do everything right?

Sure, if you consider stupendous spending, the creation of faux industries—“the average cost of alleged new green jobs will be $135,000 per job”—and the taking over of failed ones.

With “the $780 billion stimulus plan,” the prez purports to have saved 1 million jobs, but by Kudlow’s calculations, each cost “roughly $200,000 per job.”

Mr. Midas touch has closed “down federal lands for oil and gas drilling,” opened up more EPA departments for capping-and-trading, is leading a government takeover of health care, and this is barely the beginning of BO’s transformation of “the government’s relation to the private economy.”

Because he is a dyed-in-the-wool statist, BO cannot conceive that by dolling out unemployment benefits, and state aid; launching government jobs programs—all of which necessitate the seizure of private wealth through taxing, borrowing, and printing paper—he is taking a wrecking ball to the job market, and the private economy.

Update (Jan. 9): I think BO is genuinely surprised. Contra Glenn Beck, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I believe in the banality of evil. BO believes in the Keynesian “remedied.” I think he’s scratching his head.

Here’s the mundane truth conspiracies obscure (from the post “On Conspiracy Theories”):

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.
Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold.