32
More
Words
to
Weaken
Our
Democracy
September 25, 2008
“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” - Section 8 of the Paulson Proposal
Ancient Rome was once a democracy, too, complete with an elected ruling senate. But then a series of crises arrived, and Rome’s senators willingly, even gladly, surrendered their responsibilities, first to a triumvirate, and when even that meager set of checks and balances proved too stifling, finally an emperor.
Things worked out reasonably well… for a while, anyway. Life under Augustus was about as pleasant as could be expected, give or take a bit of slavery, several wars and the occasional plague.
The same cannot be said for his successors. However, by then it was too late. The Romans had squandered their ability to check the excesses of Caligula or dismiss Nero from office.
Our democracy is not perfect.
The millions of dollars required to attain any office higher than dogcatcher pretty much ensure that only the most determined efforts on the part of the citizenry will have any impact on the behavior of the upper class and their stooges in Washington. What’s more, when those citizens do get off their collective duff, they are frequently wrongheaded in their actions.
Democracy is clumsy, slow and awkward. Winston Churchill described it as “the worst form of government -- except for all the others that have been tried.”
However, it is the system I grew up with, and so I get a bit touchy when someone proposes to shut it down.
I kept my mouth shut when they proposed the Patriot Act. I had my doubts as to the idea of concentrating that much power in one branch of government.
But then, I am from New York City. I had been in the World Trade Center the week before it was destroyed. And I have friends who were still there when the planes hit.
Vicious personal attacks like that will tend to influence your decision process.
The current situation is not the result of some horrible outside force attacking us. There are no Huns or Varangians massing on our borders. No one is starving. There are no plagues killing our loved ones.
It is the result of bad decisions made by a relatively small number of men who were rewarded handsomely for their actions. The companies that hired these men are now going bankrupt.
It took years for us to get here, and it will take years to fix this mess. We will probably screw it up once or twice along the way. That is why I continue to recommend the purchase of put option contracts against both broad sectors of the market as well as specific weak individual players.
I seldom discuss politics in this forum. However, this is one of those moments when the gap between politics and economics is so thin you couldn’t drag a piece of dental floss between them.
But
I do not think that we should be handing the keys to the vault to the same group who robbed it in the first place. And we certainly should not give away our right to ask them what the hell they are doing with our money. Or to put them in jail if they lie about it.
The Paulson Proposal does exactly that: It places one man, secretary of the U.S. Treasury Henry Paulson, above the law, the Congress, the courts and the electorate.
It renders him Caesar.
- Adam Lass, Senior Editor, WaveStrength Options Weekly
