Normally I stream Rush Limbaugh at my desk, actually I listen to Glenn Beck first then follow it up with Rush. Since the election though, I haven’t been listening to nearly as much as I normally do because the news is just too depressing. Every day there seems to be a new townhall meeting that Obama has flown off to. Let’s see, with the economy as it is, in the tank I mean, corporate presidents are no longer allowed to use their corporate jets to fly into Washington to get reamed out by the likes of Barney Franks and his crew, but it is fine to fly Air Force One and all the accutremonts all across the country on a daily basis.

Meanwhile orders placed years ago for aircraft by major corporations are being cancelled and causing an entire industy to teeter on the brink of disaster in order for a couple of corporate bigwigs to save face in front of some stuffed shirts in Washington.

Anyway back to my original point. Rush has gotten this thing all wrong. Today he said that this was straight out of the pages of Orwell’s 1984, but actually this whole thing can be taken almost verbatim from the pages of Ayn Rands Novel, Atlas Shrugged. What needs to happen now, is the people being made to come under the thumb of the federal government just need to go limp. Let Obama run the banks, the manufacturing facilities the wheels of industry that have made this country great. Let him run it, if he can, otherwise, get the hell out of the way and let the people who know what they are doing do it.

But that’s just My Arrogant Opinion

I have been hearing a lot over the past several weeks about big corporations and how they are screwing the American People by paying bonuses, salaries, buying corporate jets, etc.  What I haven’t heard much about is integrity, committment, honor, etc.

Companies don’t operate from the seat of their pants normally speaking.  Salaries and bonuses aren’t given willy-nilly at the spur of the moment.  Corporate jets are not something you run out and buy on a whim, nor are they purchased just to keep from inconveniencing some executive somewhere.

These things were all negotiated long before anyone even thought that there would ever be the need of a bailout.  But here comes Congress acting all big and tough, never having managed a big corporation wanting to tell the people who do how to do it.  Slashing expenditures left and right and telling corporations that they had better bail on these committments.  Committments which had been made in some cases years before.

How many people worked on, and made their living from building the plane that Congress forced Citigroup to cancel?  Are they now going to lose their jobs because the company they work for has lost a $50 million dollar sale?

How is this lost sale going to affect the bottom line of the manufacturer?  Many of the employees likely have Citigroup Credit Cards which they may have difficulty paying now that the sale is lost which was negotiated  many months ago.  Who is going to pay their credit card bills now that Congress has decided that the jobs of people working for Citigroup are more important than those who make airplanes?

The only law that Congress seems to be any good at following is the “Law of Unintended Consequences.”  Even good Ol’ Charlie Rangle and our new Treasury Secretary will follow the mandates of this law.  Because this is a natural law, they have no choice.  When you stick your nose into something that is working like it is supposed to and try to fix something that isn’t broken, this is what happens.  Every attempt you make to fix something here pushes something out of whack somewhere else.  This is why President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most dangerous words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,’” he wasn’t kidding.  Anytime government tries to fix something they manage to make it worse.  We need to take our medicine, and let the economy fix itself, that is what it does.

But, that is just my Arrogant Opinion.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi intimates babies are a drain to our nation.  Contraception is a major piece of the stimulus package because according to Pelosi it will save states money.  Obviously, that makes Nancy Pelosi a poster child for Prophylactics.  It’s something she believes in.  Whoop-te-friggin-do!

Nancy, tells us that she didn’t come to Washington to be bi-partisan, or partisan, but non-partisan.  Maybe that is why she did not let ANY Republican have a hand in drafting the latest ‘stimulus’ bill.  Well, truth be told, that may well be a good thing for the Republicans as they will be able to say that they had absolutely NOTHING to do with the bill.

Speaking of bi-partisan support for something, there was a bit of that on the Hill this week.  Democrats joined with all of the Republicans in voting against the stimulus bill.  But who wants to hear that?

But that is just My Arrogant Opinion.

Republicans are bummed out that the Democratic party is in control.  If they want to, the Democrats can push through any piece of legislation they desire without anything more than vocal protests.  President Obama has made it clear during his first week in office that it was going to be his way or the highway, when he told Republican leaders that ‘he won’.

Everyone is too big to fail.  Treasury Secretary Nominees are too important to disqualify simply because they can’t master Turbo-Tax, nor are they willing to pay their taxes.  We give corporations money, then immediately tell them how they can spend it.

So maybe it is a good thing that Republicans can actually affect nothing, because when it collapses hopefully people will see that it is a failure of government to accomplish something our government was never intended to accomplish in the first place.  Maybe then we can try to get out of the way of a truly free market and let it take care of itself.

The sooner government gets out of the business of nurse maid the sooner we can start to recover.

But that’s just My Arrogant Opinion.

Michael Scherer of Swampland quotes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as saying “…Democrats believe in the free market, which can and does create jobs, wealth, and capital, but left to its own devices it has created chaos. …” Pardon me Madam Speaker, but isn’t that a contradiction in terms? How can the Democrats believe in something that, according to you, creates chaos when left to its own devices? A free market is just that, free. It is when you try to control it that it creates chaos.

Try keeping your nose out of things you do not understand, and maybe they will work the way they are supposed to. You have no idea what a free market will do, because you never have left it alone to be free. When you take the risk out of the market, it is certainly not free. Markets involve risk.

We will take our lumps, thanks to Clinton’s policies designed to force banks to lend to people who were unqualified in order for the Democrats to get credit for putting everyone in a house, whether or not they could afford it. Hopefully, enough of the citizenry has seen what the liberal left can accomplish, and will boot the rascals out!

But, that is just My Arrogant Opinion.

I was leery of John McCain from the beginning. I was actually looking forward to voting for Duncan Hunter, but he dropped out of the race before I had a chance. I thought about becoming a Fred Head, but alas, he didn’t make it either. I ended up voting for Mitt, just a few days before he dropped as well. Right now, with my track record of every candidate I have gotten behind falling out of the race, I am thinking of supporting whoever becomes the Democratic Nominee. I am curious whether or not my support is actually detrimental to a candidate.

My blood runs cold at the thought of any of our present choices becoming the President. Both Hillary and Obama have openly stated that they want to turn our country into a Socialist Paradise starting with Nationalized Health Care and then moving on to stripping the profits (and incentives to produce) from our oil companies. Obviously the schools they attended didn’t have economics as a part of the curriculum.

What choices does that leave us with? Ron Paul? I am all about getting rid of the IRS and getting back to a smaller government which actually looks at the Constitution to see what it is supposed to do, but I think his chances are about as slim as a snowball in Global Warming. He also scares me with his ideas about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is just too much, too quick, our country is not ready for that amount of change in one big step.

Where does that leave us? John McCain, War Hero. The only thing I like about McCain is his stand on the war. But you have to wonder about him. War is a dirty business, and there are things done there that you really don’t want discussed in the parlor over tea. I can understand his personal position on torture and Gitmo, but I think that it is wrong to tell our enemies what we will or will not do, what lines we are willing to cross, and those we won’t, but if our Nation’s security is at risk, we should have the freedom to cross those lines if needed.

What about the price of gasoline? All three of the main candidates have proposed their solution for the high price of gas at the pump. The problem is, they are just pandering to the voters. They don’t have a solution. At most, they have a plan for very short term relief for a problem that has far reaching implications. We need to get out of the way and let our country do what our country does best, and that is, find a solution.

Stop this talk about confiscating profits. Stop trying to regulate every aspect of our lives. Give us the freedom to think and experiment. We will never find a solution to any problem when the government has us so tied up and regulated with petty rules that every time we try to do something we trip over the red tape.

Open up our oil fields to exploration. We have technology to drill without destroying the countryside now, let’s use it! John McCain said on the Glenn Beck Radio Program last week that he would as soon drill for oil in the Grand Canyon as to drill ANWR. I agree with Glenn’s commentary on his statement that he was all for it as well, if there was oil in the canyon. Of course, that is a gross example, but we have oil reserves in this country, we have huge coal reserves, we have some of the best scientific minds in the world here and the best facilities. LET US USE OUR OWN RESOURCES!

But, that is just My Arrogant Opinion.

A mortgage crisis, people losing their homes, mortgage banks going under. Something must be done! Yeah, the people who received home loans they couldn’t afford need to lose their house. The mortgage banker who bought those loans knew they were buying shaky assets when they bought them, they need to take the loss as well.

We live in a free country, free to succeed, free to fail. That is what makes the country and the economy grow. We have to take responsibility for our own actions and stop crying for the government to bail us out when we make a mistake. Where is the personal responsibility? Where is the moral fortitude? When did it become my responsibility to make your house note?

When the government steps in to bail out these bad loans, we are simply reinforcing this idea that no one needs to take responsibility for their actions. Don’t worry about it, the government will bail you out, after all, they have money printing machines, they can just print some more. Funny how the government can see the free market work when it comes to the money supply, but doesn’t seem to believe it works in the marketplace in general. We carefully control the money supply to prevent a surplus because that will lead to inflation, but we can’t leave the market alone to balance itself.

Sure, that means that some will fail. The problem is that in this country we have fostered an environment where little Johnny can’t fail because we are no longer keeping score. When it is impossible to fail, it becomes impossible to win as well and that is when we all fail.

ANWAR – Nineteen million acres of controversy. According to a news bulletin released by the Department of the Interior in March of 2003, the potential for oil production from ANWAR exceeds the daily oil production for ANY onshore reserve thus far discovered in the United States.

Further, the bulletin states that with current technology, we can still protect the ecology, create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil supplies. Estimates from the Department of the Interior suggest production of 1.4 million barrels of oil daily, or approximately the amount we imported daily from Saudi Arabia in January of 2008.

One of our least visited public land sites, the ANWAR sits at the very top of Alaska where it connects to Canada. It is estimated that out of 19,000,000 acres of the reserve, no more than 2,000 would be needed to retrieve the oil reserves contained there. Why do we not have people there drilling as we speak? Eco-terrorism.

Groups like the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Foundation have made it politically incorrect to use our own resources. Throwing money and lobbyists against any attempt to develop our resources.

I believe it is time for us to take a stand, take back our country and kick these lobbyists out of Washington. If we will allow it, the free market will find a way to provide the things we need at the lowest possible price.

I was reminded today of something I read in the London Telegraph a few weeks ago. The Brits, Lord love ‘em, have a law requiring patients going to the emergency room to be seen within, I believe it was 4 hours from the time they entered the ER. That is the government, concerned over wait times for sick people. The problem though, is a bit bigger than that.

You see, in order to meet the time requirements, patients would be left outside in the ambulance for up to 6 hours before being taken inside for the clock to start on the ER staff. Kind of reminds me of waiting in a line for an hour or so, only to get to the window just as the clerk was going to lunch. At any rate, this is the type of top notch service we can expect if Hillary gets her way and we end up with National Health Care.

Obviously, no one in government has ever taken a college level course in economics. If everyone is paying for health care through their taxes, there are no barriers to demand. Demand becomes infinite. There aren’t enough Doctors or Hospitals in a healthy system to take care of an infinite number of patients, much less one that has been artificially stripped to its barest minimum through legislation.

When the government starts setting prices for medical procedures and surgeries, Doctors and clinics will move into some other business that is not restricting their ability to make a profit (living). As the pool of resources shrinks and prices are controlled by regulation, rationing is the next logical step that has to be made. The government will then be in a position to determine whether or not your life is worth the effort to save. Is she too old? What kind of benefit will he bring to society if we allow this procedure? There will be charts and statistics to tell health care workers whether or not to provide you with health care.

This is fairly simple economics, and something we all need to be aware of when we enter the voting booth in November.

This won’t be a long post, but I did want to get something up on here so it didn’t look empty. It will take me a bit of time to shake out the cobwebs and get things on here the way I like them, and I will probably run through several themes before I am done.

You can look for My Arrogant Opinion on politics, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy, and life in general.

Just so you know what you are looking at, I am a conservative, politically, socially and economically. While I am not an anarchist, I certainly believe that the government is far and away too large and is not doing what it was charged with doing by the Constitution.

I hope you will stop back by soon as I hope to be posting regularly and would love to hear from you.