Sunday, January 8, 2012

Turning on the hand that hasn't fed you

As the Republican Party enters the selection process for its national nominee for the Office of the President of the United States, two things have become very clear:

Mitt Romney is clearly the man to beat, and everyone else is determined to let their egos do as much damage to every frontrunner as possible.

The need for this nation is to become more jobs-friendly, less governmentally intrusive, less socially intrusive and return to the core principles the founders made is too great to ignore. Rather than spend like there is no tomorrow to keep the people enslaved in their dependence to the government dole, we need to adopt an old vision that saw hard work rewarded by success.

We have misread, through the commerce clause, the phrase, "...promote the general welfare," to mean a governmental guarantee for our existence. While borne out of a need to help those most in need decades ago, we now have expanded the definition of need to include a family of four making in excess of 50,000 per year.  This isn't the only problem.

When sausage-making process that is the legislature in Washington, DC, rarely considers the long-term impact those laws have on the nation. When Barney Frank and Chris Dodd led the charge in the 90's for affordable home ownership, it was seen as a mechanism to increase home ownership among minorities. While home ownership is seen as a good thing,  in order to make homes more affordable, banks and the MACs corrupted the system to use ARM mortgages and zero down qualifier language. In order to diversify risk, banks began bundling these high risk mortgages with "safer" ones and thus began the eventual collapse of the housing and banking industries.

This failure to foresee phenomenon is called blow back. It is a failure of strategic leadership to not consider what things look like when scaled out or up to hundreds of thousands of units. Although started under Bill Clinton, the program was not monitored properly under George W. Bush and magnified intensely to the point that a blip in the economy as experienced in late 2007 (I discussed this when the TIF plan was brought forward for Prairie Winds Subdivision at Sidney City Council), namely the "freeze" period in these ARM loans was expiring, people began to default on their mortgages due to the exorbitant increases in their monthly payments. Multiply this times hundreds of thousands and you get where we have gotten.

This nation needs fiscal conservatism more that social conservatism. While possible to coexist, the hugely divisive electorate since 2000 means that left and right are further apart than ever in our history. Mitt Romney would be better served to sit a little taller in his conservative saddle by realizing that swift action to reform entitlements, including the eventual dissolution of social security (replaced by some other government monitored, but private plan) would be in the long-term best interest of the nation. Get government out of the practice of certifying marriage for tax purposes. Don't fight civil unions for gays and lesbians.

Romney would do well to take what is appealing from his rivals and integrate it into his strategy. He must do so in a thoughtful way that does not alienate his challengers or their supporters, because we know how good Barack Obama is at making speeches. We, as conservatives, need not give the President any greater opportunity to wreak greater havoc on the country.

A friend mine had a bumper sticker once that had the message, "Visualize no liberals." Nearly four years of empty promises later, I hope for the nation's sake that the liberals turn on the hand that hasn't fed them.