Joe Biden

Congressman Mike Doyle: $3.5 Trillion in Spending is Too Little for the Government to “Spend Any Money”

by Hans Bader on August 2, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Features, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Post image for Congressman Mike Doyle: $3.5 Trillion in Spending is Too Little for the Government to “Spend Any Money”

Even after the modest reductions in spending resulting from Sunday’s deal to raise the federal debt ceiling, the federal government will still spend $3.5 trillion in 2012 — compared to $2.9 trillion in 2008. But Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) had a big tantrum yesterday that the spending won’t be even bigger: “We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said. Referring to the Tea Party, he lamented that “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.” (The Tea Party doesn’t control either House of Congress; Democrats control the Senate.)

His reference to peaceful Tea Party members as “terrorists” was echoed by Vice President Biden. “Vice President Joe Biden joined House Democrats in lashing tea party Republicans Monday, accusing them of having ‘acted like terrorists’ in the fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.” Although Biden regularly voted to increase the debt limit as a senator when a Democrat was in the White House, he and Obama voted against such increases when Republicans were in the White House, even when such debt ceiling increases were needed to pay for federal programs and wars that Biden had voted for. Unlike some Tea Party Republicans, Biden did not make any constructive suggestions about how to rein in deficit spending when he voted against increases in the debt limit. He simply did so to score partisan political points.

Doyle’s claim that Tea Party members are terrorists was echoed by some intemperate left-wing op-ed writers, like The New York Times‘ Joe Nocera, who claimed today that “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” Curiously, although left-wing journalists depict peaceful Tea Party members as terrorists, they depict violent Greek anti-austerity protesters who oppose cutbacks in deficit spending as “largely peaceful” even when such protesters firebomb banks, resulting in the deaths of innocent people. To them, “peaceful” simply means you don’t question the big-government status quo.

Even with the cuts in the July 31 deal to lift the debt ceiling, America is still spending so much money that its credit rating may be downgraded by Standard and Poor’s. That might wreak havoc on the economy, but The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman called for even more deficit spending in an August 1 op-ed. His frequent lament is that President Obama is insufficiently “progressive,” even though Obama is by any reasonable measure the most left-wing president in history. The federal budget deficit is now $1.6 trillion — compared to $160 billion in 2007. But even increasing the deficit by a factor of ten just isn’t enough for progressives like Krugman.

Joe Biden vs. Adam Smith

by Ryan Young on November 18, 2010 · 1 comment

in Economy, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

Vice President Joe Biden recently said that every great idea of the last two-plus centuries came from government. My colleague Alex Schibuola and I rebut him over at The Daily Caller using Adam Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as our weapon of choice. Biden, it turns out, is an almost perfect example of what Adam Smith described as the “man of system.” This is not a good thing.

As Smith put it:

The man of system … is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

The problem, of course, is that human beings are not chess pieces. They have their own wants and desires. They move on their own. The man of system does not take this into account. This is why his plans fail time after time, even if he has the best of intentions.

Read our whole article here.

For those of you interested in learning more about Adam Smith, I couldn’t recommend him more highly. Don’t be scared off by his 18th-century prose style. Sit down with either of his books for less than an hour and you’ll develop and ear for it.

I don’t agree with everything Smith said; he invented the labor theory of value. But he was a keen observer of human nature. He was also a kindly soul, who wanted man to be free, happy, and prosperous. The overarching theme of his thought is mankind as social creature.  Our social instincts color how we form our notions of morality (the impartial spectator theory), and explain why economies function the way they do (peaceful exchange, as opposed to simple theft).

The Theory of Moral Sentiments is available for free at the Online Library of Economics and Liberty. You can also get a hard copy or a Kindle edition from Amazon.

For help wading through and digesting Smith’s arguments, I recommend Russ Roberts and Dan Klein’s six-part podcast series about the book, and D. D. Raphael’s short and readable The Impartial Spectator: Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy.

Other quality secondary sources on Smith include E.G. West’s short-yet-thorough biography, and P.J. O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations, which pairs Smith’s economic theories with O’Rourke’s mordant wit.

Image credit: Joeff’s flickr photostream.

Joe Biden’s Weak Case for Government Meddling

by Ryan Young on November 10, 2010

in Economy

Joe Biden believes that government played a large role in the success of railroads in the 19th century. In this video, Don Boudreaux points out that that isn’t actually true. There were four transcontinental railroads. Three of them received subsidies. The fourth was the Great Northern Railway, founded by Canadian immigrant James J. Hill. He alone rejected any special government favors.

All three subsidized railroads went into receivership. Hill’s Great Northern Railway remained solvent, and is still in business today as BNSF Railway.

Dear Mr. Biden: Vice Presidents Were Meant to Be Seen, Not Heard

by Alex Schibuola on October 27, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Vice President Joe Biden claims: “Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive.”

I believe that Adam Smith wrote a very accurate description of Mr. Biden in the 18th century (before government vision and incentives too!):

The man of system…is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them…

…in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

(Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759)

Would Mr. Biden like to also step up and claim credit for the following government achievements too?

Roosevelt’s Japanese internment camps, legitimacy of slavery in the world, inflation, war after war after war, Jim Crow laws, nuclear weapons, biological weapons, corporate welfare and bailouts, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Hitler’s Holocaust (12 million dead), Stalin’s Soviet Union (20 million dead), Mao’s Communist China (40 million dead), Kim Jong Il’s North Korea (body count still in progress), Chavez’s Venezuela (a.k.a. Titanic), Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the suppression of liberty. I could go on and on…

Mr. Biden, I find your vanity and conceit to be overwhelming.

Liberal Bootlicking

by Hans Bader on April 10, 2009

in International, Legal, Politics as Usual

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently visited Cuba and licked Casto’s boots, calling him an “inspiring” visionary and an “amazing human being.” (Never mind that racism against people of African heritage is far more pervasive in Cuba than here. Much of Cuba’s population is black. But how many of Cuba’s Communist leaders are black? Almost none. It’s no accident.)

The Obama Administration has broken campaign promises repeatedly and lied about a Supreme Court case that it made a big campaign issue.

Now, as Charles Krauthammer notes in the Washington Post, Obama is going through Europe, badmouthing the U.S. to try and curry favor with the European public. European leaders have responded by stiffing Obama and giving him none of what he asked for (like assistance in Afghanistan). Obama said there must consequences, not just empty words, against North Korea for shooting a missile over Japan, even as he voiced only empty words (“Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something,” he said). The only concrete defense proposal Obama made is to cut the U.S.’s stockpile of nukes and eliminate Alaskan missile defense systems that might be useful against North Korean missiles. As Obama explains, only the U.S. has ever used nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, in a gaffe that most of the press chose not to report, Vice President Biden thanked Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero for his support in Iraq — even though Zapatero is anti-American and not only pulled Spain’s troops out of Iraq, but called on other European leaders assisting the U.S. to stop doing so.

With the U.S. government unable to even remember who its friends and enemies are, it’s perhaps not surprising that Somali pirates have been emboldened to kidnap American seamen and seize our ships in the crucial shipping lanes leading to the Suez Canal. CEI’s Eli Lehrer has come up with a creative solution for the pirate problem.