Two Outstanding Leftist Qualities: Insanity and Hubris

You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.  Thomas Sowell

By Rich Kozlovich

On Wednesday, August 7, 2019 Victor Morton posted an article in the Washington Times entitled,  "Twitter locks Mitch McConnell account over protest video", saying:

The reelection campaign of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell posted a video of protesters yelling obscenities and making threats toward “Massacre Mitch” at his Kentucky home. Twitter then locked the account, claiming the tweet violated its policy on violent threats. A Twitter spokesman told Politico on Wednesday night that the @Team_Mitch account was “temporarily locked out of their account for a Tweet that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.”

The arrogance and stupidity of this action boggles the mind.  Now in order for his account to be unlocked Mitch McConnell has to eliminate the video exposing those who are threatening he and his family at his home because it's a public safety issue?  Really?  You've got to be kidding!  Right?

So who exactly was McConnell threatening?   McConnell isn't threatening anyone!  It's he and his family who are the ones being threatened, at their home no less.  So exposing that is a public threat?  Really?  To whom? To the insane and violent leftist loons who are threatening him?

But one thing this action makes clear, the more they act in this manner the more clear it becomes how corrupt they are.  This will come back to haunt them in the near future.  As for now - Mitch  McConnell needs to sue them, if for no other reason than to have a huge expose about who and what they are. 

It isn't  violent threats they're concerned about, it's the truth that scares them.  Heaven forbid the public should see these misfits for who and what they are, and at some point the government is going to step in and impose rules or even break up these businesses. 

I've not been in favor of government oversight of the big tech social media oligarchs, and I'm not all that crazy about monopoly busting because these companies have become too big or too successful.  But we have to see this clearly. If we, as a society, can justify government interference in busting up businesses because they're too big, or preventing businesses from becoming bigger, at some point we will have to come to the conclusion public safety outweighs economics. 

The downside is government bureaucrats will become even more ridiculous than are the big tech oligarchs when they start making the rules.  They call these rules regulations, which carries the force of law, and before you know it, these unelected bureaucrats are out of control. 

The housing bubble that crashed the economy in 2008 was a direct result of the Community Reinvestment Act.  Here's the story.

 In 1977 the media discovered the word “redlining” and they used it like a whip. Redlining was supposed to be a racist action by the banks who wanted to prevent poor people and minorities, primarily black, from owning houses. Sounds insane doesn’t it? It is! Especially when a study came out showing that there was no redlining, that in fact these people were denied these loans because they were bad credit risks.

Yet redlining is what they had everyone believing, so in 1977 Congress, under the Carter administration, demanded that lending institutions pay attention to the “credit need” of the community and not on their ability to repay the loan and passing the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

Under this act the banks would be graded on how many of these bad loans they gave out. If they did business in this manner they received a high score. The score was directly proportionate to how easy it was to do a merger or an acquisition or even open a new branch and their ability to borrow money from the government. All of which the government controlled!

Under this act if some community activists, like the group ACORN, didn’t like the way you did business, they could cause all sorts of problems.  Stan J. Liebowitz, economics professor at the University of Texas at Dallas writes:

 "Home mortgages have been a political piñata for many decades. Greedy lenders aren’t the real reason for this mess. “In a nutshell, Liebowitz contends that the federal government over the last 20 years pushed the mortgage industry so hard to get minority homeownership up, that it undermined the country's financial foundation to achieve its goal."

Everyone was happy.  Everyone basked in the blaze of self congratulations. All of these bad loans were now declared to be “innovation lending” and they were praised by the regulators, academics and activists and because so much pressure was put on the lending institutions in the 90’s by the Clinton administration home ownership among minorities surged.

The media called this “one of the hidden success stories” of that administration. At one point the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is supposed to have “produced a manual in the early '90s that warned mortgage lenders were to no longer deny urban and lower-income minority applicants on such "outdated" criteria as credit history, down payment or employment income.”

It was a real catch-22. If they continued giving out these bad loans, they would go out of business. If they didn’t comply there were real financial penalties, and if they raised interested rates they were accused of “predatory lending”.

Unfortunately this was undermining an entire economic system and the inevitable happened.

Jeff Jacoby notes:

"Trapped in a no-win situation entirely of the government's making, lenders could only hope that home prices would continue to rise, staving off the inevitable collapse. But once the housing bubble burst, there was no escape. Mortgage lenders have been bankrupted, thousands of subprime homeowners have been foreclosed on, and countless would-be borrowers can no longer get credit. The financial fallout has hurt investors around the world. And all of it thanks to the government, which was sure it understood the credit industry better than the free market did, and confidently created the conditions that made disaster unavoidable.”

That economic disaster was a direct response to government interference.   Interference caused by people with a political agenda who were totally unqualified to make decisions about anything involving banking, and probably much of anything else for that matter.  And they didn't care about the consequences because they had a mission.  

Leftists always have a mission, and mostly that mission involves getting conservatives to sign on to their power plays in the name of "public good".  So, now picture what happens when both the left and the right decide  the government should be deciding who can post on social media, and what can be posted.  Do we really think they'll be better than the big tech oligarchs in the long term?

Busting them up will only be a band aid fix.  What needs to happen is for a new social media platform come to the fore.  Let the market handle this, and even if it takes some time, which it will, that is the best fix possible. 

Competition!  Capitalism!  Everyone wants perfection, but the best we can hope for is the most acceptable imperfection.  The market is the most acceptable imperfection. 

Let's not let the emotions of the moment impact our long range thinking.  We need to see farther, deeper and wider than everyone else and recognize government interference in the social media will cause - not may cause, will cause - a long term problem that will not be fixable.