Did you happen to catch the fella from Moody's Investors Service on Thursday giving "expert" testimony before Congress on the benefits and detriments of bailing out Detroit automakers⢠He recommended it be done.
But what a hoot! As if the American people should believe debt raters who ascribed premium valuations to big bankers' exercises in creating valueless "high-yield investments" in the equivalent of Irish fairies dancing on bogs.
But this gent wasn't nearly as entertaining as Ron Gettelfinger, the president of the United Auto Workers union. He went on nationwide cable news networks on Wednesday whining about this country's lack of an "industrial policy."
This is better known by a phrase that newfangled "progressives" dare not even whisper -- command economics.
Heck, even Charles Schultze, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under economic malaise expert Jimmy Carter, warned of the perversion of "industrial policy":
"The first problem for the government in carrying out an industrial policy is that we actually know precious little about identifying, before the fact, a 'winning' industrial structure," Mr. Schultze once wrote in the Brookings Review.
"There does not exist a set of economic criteria that determine what gives different countries preeminence in particular lines of business. Nor is it at all clear what the substantive criteria would be for deciding which older industries to protect or restructure."
So, by all means, we need an "industrial policy" in this country, Mr. Gettelfinger⢠That's as daft as paying people not to work, which the UAW knows a little something about.
Surely Chris Dodd , the Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, was rehearsing his comedy club act in congressional hearings last week. Or, in the least, proving yet again that he understands basic economics about as well as Gettelfinger understands "industrial policy."
Mr. Dodd lamented the "unintended consequences" of not providing hundreds of billions in loan guarantees and other aid to the Big Three.
But what of the unintended consequences of throwing good money after bad⢠This certainly does not represent the most efficient allocation of resources. It does, however, represent the worst of the government's fatal conceit in thinking it can -- or should -- pick winners and losers and dictate consumer choice.
Speaking of hoots , Westmoreland County Commission Chairman Tom Balya, a Democrat, states in a Nov. 28 campaign Web site posting that yours truly "is really nothing more than a hired hand (from where, who knows?)" for an editorial page of "hate and negativity."
This, from Mr. Congeniality to this scrivener in a Nov. 23 e-mail, replete with a subject line that reads "You chump": "(Y)ou are lower than pond scum and your nose is dark brown from having it you-know-where."
I'm also "a little punk" and "trash," he writes in the same e-mail.
Gee, don't "progressives" like Balya consider this "hate speech"?
Then, after calling out Mr. Balya for his none-too-tacit threat in that same missive -- "When you are man enough to say something to my face ..... I'll be waiting" -- this, in a follow-up e-mail: "Are you that much of a sissy?"
Ah, the decorous regurgitations of a batty baddy masquerading as a public official. Aren't there laws regarding exercises in "official oppression" and using electronic communication devices to threaten people⢠Where's a good gendarme when you need him?
Balya has his too-tight panties in a too-bothersome pucker because the Trib called him out for using his taxpayer-funded county e-mail account for political purposes. He even defended the practice in a Nov. 25 e-mail to Gary and Deborah Salada: "I have all (of my) e-mails merged into computers here at work and at home," he told them.
Do tell. If "all" means "all," this means Balya is regularly mixing personal and political e-mails on his taxpayer-funded county computer and, based on some of the time stamps of some of those e-mails, on county time.
"Only a jerk like McNickle would whine about such a thing," Balya wrote the Saladas. Proving yet again that the ignorant classes are the dangerous classes and that from ignorance, Tom Balya's comfort flows.
