Atlas How I wish this were required reading for everybody in this country: Stephen Moore, in the Wall Street Journal, compares recent government “policy” to the near-parody programs Ayn Rand described in Atlas Shrugged:

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.

In the book, these relentless wealth redistributionists and their programs are disparaged as “the looters and their laws.” Every new act of government futility and stupidity carries with it a benevolent-sounding title. These include the “Anti-Greed Act” to redistribute income (sounds like Charlie Rangel’s promises soak-the-rich tax bill) and the “Equalization of Opportunity Act” to prevent people from starting more than one business (to give other people a chance). My personal favorite, the “Anti Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” aims to restrict cut-throat competition between firms and thus slow the wave of business bankruptcies. Why didn’t Hank Paulson think of that?

These acts and edicts sound farcical, yes, but no more so than the actual events in Washington, circa 2008.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why people can’t grasp how badly our politicians are running the government right now.

It’s just COMMON SENSE.

I know that there are good, thoughtful people out there who hope the Democrats can rescue this country from the mess we’re in. But government isn’t the answer. You can’t force people, through legislation, to not be stupid and greedy. They’re going to be stupid and greedy no matter what, and when you pass a law to restrict one behavior, they’ll just express their greed & stupidity some other way.

This is an existential issue, folks. You can’t legislate what goes on in peoples’ souls.

Meanwhile, that growing pile of increasingly byzantine laws encumbers EVERYONE. You end up with lunacy. You end up with things like a tax code that’s so complicated people can’t fill out their income tax forms without professional help. As one example of many.

That’s why the minimalist approach of our Constitution is such a beautiful thing.

Probably the best article I’ve read so far on what was going on, in the last few years, on Wall Street is this one: a piece in Conde Nast Portfolio by Michael Lewis (author of Liar’s Poker.) The article does a great job of describing just what greed & stupidity looked like among the guys who engineered our current fiscal disaster.

But we don’t make it better by putting our politicians in charge — because they are every bit as greedy, and if anything more stupid, than the Wall Streeters.

They don’t have our best interest at heart — and we don’t have the resources to keep them honest. We just don’t. We’re looking after our homes, and our families, and our jobs.

There’s only one way out. We have to take our medicine and put our economy back on sound fiscal footing again. Even if it means we go through a period of economic upheaval, and uncertainty, and even hardship for a few years. We can handle it. We can come together at a community level and take care of each other.

That’s the only way out of this mess.

Common sense.