It's Always Darkest Before The Bottom Falls Out

The Chicken Little syndrome is in full effect in Washington, DC. The sky is falling; the end is near; time to circle the wagons and nationalize everything in the private sector because only the federal government can save us now.

Or so we are being led to believe. The "too big to fail" mentality has gone extreme.

Congress is proposing taking a 20% stake in the Big 3 automakers. Not content to allow the genuises who have for decades refused to rethink, revamp, restructure and retool themselves, Congress believes that it can take over and do a better job of producing cars that America will buy.

Anyone remember the Edsel?

Now we have the President-elect Obama telling us that it's going to get worse before it gets better. Talk about managing expectations!

So to help the incoming prez wants to resurrect an old failure -- the public works programs of FDR. Not content with rebuilding roads and bridges, the incoming administration has set its sights on "modernizing" schools as well as "giving every American access to an electronic medical record as part of an “economic recovery plan."

FDR's WPA was a bureaucratic inefficient mess that ate up massive resources with minimal productivity. Time and again the private sector has proven it can do a better quality job at a lower price than the federal government can.

Yet one can't tell that to the Obama administration.

Let's expand the government's role beyond anything that was envisioned by the Constitution. As Ed Morrissey writes in his blog, Hot Air, "The federal government should work on interstate highways and its bridges, and state governments should remain responsible for their transportation infrastructure." I totally agree.

As for health records on the Internet, that's already happening under HIPAA, so I'm not sure what more the Obama administration thinks it can do. It just demonstrates that this incoming administration is willing to turn a blind eye to history in an attempt to sell "change."

This kind of "change" when the country is tettering on the edge of financial disaster is nothing short of madness. It's like a person declaring bankruptcy and then rushing out to apply for more credit cards and loans to continue a wild, reckless spending spree. Ed Morrissey summarized it best when he wrote:

Recreating the WPA and proposing even more massive spending programs in the face of our precarious financial condition and debt load finds its equivalent only perhaps in the apocryphal fiddling of Nero while Rome burned.