phik

SIR — Your article gets one thing right: this is capitalism at its worst, and it must not go forward.

Every prospectus for GSE debt for 30 years has included huge bold text on the cover making unambiguous its lack of government backing.

To bail out speculators and foreign governments — who collected billions courtesy of higher yields over Treasuries — at US taxpayer expense is not merely morally bankrupt, but treason.

Bailout or collapse are not the only choices. Sell the assets via receivership, like any other bankrupt company, and wind them down. If you believe your own rhetoric about asset values, the bondholders lose only a few percent. Either way, the responsible parties wear the loss.

Finally, the notion that this action reduces mortgage costs seems optimistic at best. More likely is that government borrowing costs rise, as the bond market punishes the US government for its profligacy. The spread may narrow, but nobody gets a cheaper mortgage.

Phil Schwan
Perth, Australia

It may be the Democrats’ hypothetical message, but what about their actions?

bankers first, bailing out Fanny and Freddie, refusing to prosecute the fraud

war first, happy to go along with the Iraq adventure; keen for another in Georgia

debt first, selling out the next generation

inflation first, a tax that hits the poorest hardest

government first, even — perhaps especially — when it’s unconstitutional

To be clear: I’m no Republican apologist, and the last 20 years of GOP efforts have been one disaster after another.

But let’s stop pretending that the Democrats are any better, that there will be any kind of meaningful “change”. They just pick slightly different winners and losers:

Neither party stands for freedom; personal, social, or economic.

Neither party wants peace; both permit Iraq to go on. Both are eager for more war, be it in Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Syria, Georgia, Darfur, …

Neither party is economically responsible. They spend. They inflate the currency. They strangle any American business not large enough to buy favour. They bail out their friends.

Neither party upholds the constitution, in which the executive answers to Congress or the people. In which 50 states are allowed to compete for the best solutions.

In every way that matters, they are virtually identical.

Read this outstanding editorial from Salon about Obama’s flip-flop into supporting the horrendous FISA “compromise” to legalize Bush’s warrantless wiretapping and provide telecomm immunity.

This after he pledged not only to vote against the bill, but “support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Which is a shame, because it’s another instance of Obama’s position on an issue being both anti-liberty and indistinguishable from that of George Bush or John McCain. And the sudden rush of his supporters to justify his decision is sad, even if predictable:

…because the Only Thing That Matters is that Barack Obama be put in the Oval Office, and we must do anything and everything — including remain silent when he embraces a full-scale assault on the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law — because every goal is now subordinate to electing Barack Obama our new Leader.

Some hope that enough phone calls will get him to return to his commitment, and maybe they’re right.

It’s obviously more about polling than principle.

For a political science professor (and, according to Wikipedia, “publicly professed Libertarian”) Dr. Allan Saxe is either stupendously misinformed, or boldly deceptive. It doesn’t especially matter which.

His article You may like Ron Paul, but would you like his America? was held up by a friend as his explanation for why the Congressman’s presidential platform doesn’t sit well with him. Which would be fine — I’m as excited about a good debate as the next person — except that it is difficult to find any true statements in the article.

In almost every instance, he takes an accurate constitutional position about the role of the federal government, then twists it to assert that Ron Paul would eliminate all levels of government. Needless to say — owing to the constraints of the newspaper column format, no doubt — he cites no sources for these assertions.

A representative example:

At all levels of government, the elimination of programs, agencies and government support would be massive. … All compulsory public education would be erased. If you wish to educate your child, do it yourself, or send your child to a voluntary private or church school. … There would be no state financing of higher education. All education would be divorced from government.

I’m not sure where Dr. Saxe gets the idea that the Congressman wants to end public education in the 50 states. Fifteen seconds of browsing the Issues pages of the campaign web site leads to an article that is exactly on-point, in which he writes, “…under the 10th Amendment public education should be purely a state and local matter.”

The fact is that a prominent plank of the Paul campaign is to reduce federal spending and regulation to those areas permitted by the Constitution. And while, ideally, the federal Department of Education would be eliminated, he writes clearly (and repeatedly) that neither the president nor Congress have any authority to dictate anything about how states provide education.

That is, you will notice, the entire point: to remove federal government intrusion from what should properly be state issues.

Saxe repeats this straw man assertion again and again, about education, transportation, the minimum wage, eminent domain, sports stadiums (!), zoning laws (!), and so on. The nice thing about having a consistent philosophy is that I can state with certainty that Saxe is as wrong about all of those as he is about education. The ways that state and local governments address those issues are simply not matters that a Paul administration would seek to influence.

It’s hard to believe that a political science professor could manage to get tenure and write peer-reviewed papers and eat breakfast without aspirating Cheerios, yet make such an obvious blunder. But it’s also not clear why a Texas libertarian would want to write a misleading article to smear Ron Paul. Maybe Wikipedia is lying to us, and he’s really a socialist.

Can he really be so confused about basic federalism? I doubt it; it reads like a hatchet job. If my friend’s reaction is typical, apparently an effective one.

it speaks for itself, really

Although I think -$150 billion is much too conservative an estimate. They only have the Congressman down for -$2 billion for “Defence / International Relations”. More like -$500 billion, I’d think, once he ends the Iraq war, closes most of the overseas bases, and stops foreign aid programmes. Nor did they include any of the present $92 billion of corporate welfare, some of which is guaranteed to get the axe.

But they did count the $1 billion we’d save by shutting down the IRS.

The system (kind of) works!

In response to the complaints of AOPA and pilots, the FAA has relented and effectively removed the objectionable parts of the Airworthiness Directive that I complained so bitterly about.

The FAA issued an approval for an Alternative Method of Compliance that boils down to (a) check the blade during major inspections, and (b) do a visual inspection before each flight (like Robinson told you to do back in April).

In particular, there are no onerous logging requirements and student pilots can do the inspection. This is a tremendous victory for common sense.

Those of you who bothered to send a comment to the FAA — I read them all, I know who you are! — thank you!

Those of you who didn’t, even though you’re a pilot who understands the issues — for shame…

Fabulously busy lately, so here’s a party-time link roundup FOR PEOPLE TO READ OR WHATEVER:

• interesting how the “racist” newsletters weren’t, in fact, racist at all, if you actually read them. (top tip for journalists: reading comprehension still important)
• Cato’s Dan Mitchell on Ron Paul’s tax plan
• the story behind Boony’s record-setting 52 beers on the flights from Sydney to London, 1989
• the advertisement that I tried to link to last year. somehow it’s slipped past the hawk-eyed copyright owner and escaped into the wild, where the public can view it.

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.

We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called “isolationism.”

Unlike the author I don’t particularly care who owns one random asset or another, but he’s entirely correct about the general bankruptcy of the United States. Except when it’s raised by Congressman Paul, this most important issue is completely absent from the election discourse.

The federal government’s own Office of Management and Budget estimates the federal debt at $53 trillion when you consider the commitments of Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs.

The total amount set aside in anticipation of these obligations, if you combine all of the Social Security and other trust funds, rainy-day funds, general treasury accounts, and all of Al Gore’s lockboxes, is exactly zero dollars.

It should be the number #1 issue, or arguably #2 after our foreign policy disasters, but you’ll only hear it from Paul or the Comptroller General. Unless you happen to be a Democratic presidential candidate, does anyone think we can now afford to add socialized medicine to the bill?

On January 3, the FAA issued an Airworthiness Directive that goes into effect on January 18 — zero notice, without the customary public comment period.

It attempts to address a safety issue concerning Robinson helicopter blades — one that is already amply covered by Robinson service bulletins, service letters, and safety alerts — but does so in a terribly ham-fisted way. There are two serious problems.

First, it requires the pilot to make an entry in the maintenance logbook before each flight, stating that a visual inspection was conducted. This is bad policy not only because these entries will flood the logbooks with useless entries, but also because everyone in the aviation universe recommends that maintenance logbooks not be kept in the aircraft.

In the event of an accident, they may be the only insight into how the aircraft was maintained, which exact parts were present, when they were installed, and so on. To require their presence for this meaningless preflight signature runs contrary to all prior wisdom, especially since any competent pilot is already doing a pre-flight blade inspection.

Second, it screws student pilots by explicitly prohibiting them from making these inspections, effectively preventing them from legally flying solo.

Yes, they could arrange for another pilot to inspect the blades prior to departure (a pilot who, frankly, may have even less experience with helicopters than the student). But that doesn’t help if the student needs to stop for fuel on a long cross-country. Or wants to make the prudent decision to shut down and take a break at his destination. Both actions are now prohibited.

Whether or not you fly helicopters or fly at all, if you understand why this is important I urge you to submit a comment to the FAA. Even if you’re a foreign pilot this may end up affecting you, as other countries typically look to FAA Airworthiness Directives for guidance.

Reversing nonsense like this is all about the volume of outcry.

My comment is below, although it’s not showing on regulations.gov yet.

If this AD merely mandated a one-time maintenance inspection plus the visual inspections that pilots should already do, that would be one thing. Then it would be merely redundant, instead of an active hindrance.

To require documentation for each flight is both unreasonable and counterproductive. It requires that maintenance logs remain in the aircraft and therefore subject to loss or damage in an accident, contrary to all standard practice. This additional paperwork does nothing to increase safety, and may well reduce it, as it clutters logbooks with useless signatures and obscures truly relevant updates.

Furthermore, the impact on renters and student pilots is unacceptable. The status of renters as opposed to owner/operators in the AD is undefined, and the inability for students to fly solo is explicit.

There is useful precedent in SFAR 73: once a student pilot has received ground training and meets experience requirements, he is permitted to operate solo. Avoiding the dangerous flight conditions outlined in SFAR 73 requires far more care and responsibility than a simple pre-flight blade inspection — yet under this AD, a student is prohibited from doing so.

This AD places a significant burden on helicopter owners and operators without any additional safety benefit. It was issued on extremely short notice without a public comment period, even though these issues have been known to Robinson and the FAA for more than a year.

This AD should be withdrawn immediately, before it begins to disrupt operations on January 18. If the FAA feels so strongly that the existing procedures or a mandatory update to the POH are insufficient, then it would be proper to introduce a rethought AD with the customary notice and public comment process.

I know why Bruce prefers behavioural profiling over reliance on carry-on screening, but with or without profiling, why is nobody outraged about how the TSA’s writ has expanded?

Even if we assume for the moment that TSA checkpoints are constitutional for the purpose of keeping dangerous materials off of aircraft — a point that I do not concede — how have they been allowed to become catch-all checkpoints for any criminal activity? Why are drugs discovered during a carryon search admissible evidence? We lost that battle in the 1970s. But now the TSA are allowed to search for outstanding warrants?

We already have to show our papers. People are already being arrested at checkpoints for crimes unrelated to airplane security. Will it be long before passenger lists are routinely screened for outstanding criminal warrants, and people arrested when they arrive at the airport? It is hardly fantasy, given the trends of the last 15 years.

How are these checkpoints, no longer limited to the precise business of keeping aircraft safe, not a violation of the fourth amendment?

State or federal government would never be allowed to set up similar checkpoints in any other situation. Imagine such a checkpoint on a highway: stop cars at random, ask various questions of the occupants, and run a warrant check on anyone who seems suspicious.

Or stop every car on a road and perform a search for anything illegal: sawed-off shotguns, drugs, mattresses with their tags removed, &c.

Does anyone think that survives a Supreme Court challenge?

Sometimes I think about a United States in which the Supreme Court consults the constitution from time to time as the supreme law of the land, and then I have to have a little lie down and breathe into a paper bag.