Social engineering in Iraq: why not Yemen? Cuba? Iran?

...Americans are dying, not only in the war on terror, but also to codify Sharia law. Brooks claims that, in Iraq, "The role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed." (Surprisingly?) Actually, that's just a polite way of saying — and I quote directly from the Iraqi Constitution — "Islam is the official religion of the State, and it is a fundamental source of legislation."

That's one reason many of us regret our support of the Iraq war. Though I am not reflexively isolationist, I am reflexively suspicious of social engineering. And nation-building is social engineering on the grandest of scales.

Decent people, no doubt, are pleased to hear that the Iraqi people are doing well. If war makes us more secure, why only Iraq and not Yemen? Or Iran? Or Cuba? Doesn't everyone deserve to live in freedom? Do not all people deserve to own cellphones and have a decent garbage disposal system?

Or do we reserve those perks for those who pretend to have WMDs?

The question isn't whether nation building can work. It probably can. The question is was it worth it.

Leftist social engineers are coming for the suburbs - again

Liberals love Ray LaHood because he is the type of Republican who wants government to control more of American life. When President Obama named him secretary of transportation, it was not so much an act of bipartisanship as an expression of ideological solidarity.

About a month into his tenure, LaHood told the Associated Press that the administration should consider taxing people for every mile they drive their car, a system that would require tracking people's movements.

"We should look at the vehicular miles program where people are actually clocked on the number of miles that they traveled," he said. "What I see this administration doing is this -- thinking outside the box on how we fund our infrastructure in America."

LaHood's Big Brother-like suggestion proved too much even for Obama, who had just pushed a $787 billion stimulus law through Congress and was preparing to start an ambitious campaign to enact a national health program. Within 24 hours, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters the president would not back the driver-tracking plan.

As we shall see, however, the president would back other ideas LaHood had for controlling how people move.

In LaHood's view, the transportation secretary's highest duty was not to build highways and facilitate freedom of movement, but to use government to change the way people live. Early on, he announced what he called a "livability initiative" and formed a partnership with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency aimed at creating "sustainable communities."

As Ronald Utt of the Heritage Foundation observed, the partnership LaHood's department formed with HUD, together with a rhetorical attack unleashed by President Obama on suburban "sprawl," seemed to indicate the administration's "intent to re-energize and lead the Left's longstanding war against America's suburbs."

Instead of devoting its efforts to social engineering, why hasn't the EPA required that drillers develop remedies for calamities?

Reckless capitalism resulted in the Gulf oil explosion and resulting spill, which will do incalculable damage before it is remediated.

Reckless social engineering, inspired by leftist schemes to place all human activity under governmental control, bears responsibility for the failure to have control mechanisms in place to deal with the oil platform explosion and resulting catastrophe.

The event itself was predictable, if not in detail. Something, somewhere, was going to interfere with completion of a deep-sea oil well. What would happen then? Were there any shut-off valves spaced along the completed portions of the pipeline. Was there a system in place to cap the pipeline at the break?

In a rational political system, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is, after all, charged with protecting the natural environment, might have asked such questions and acted on the answers.

The EPA, however, is not much interested in such mundane questions. The EPA is more interested in seeing that carbon dioxide, which plants inhale before exhaling oxygen, in a natural process essential to life, be designated a dangerous gas that eventually will cause the oceans to boil.

That is the entry-level argument that the EPA makes in its effort to persuade American voters to cede their preferences, including their source of power supply, to the government, which could then shut coal mines and nuclear power plants and dot the countryside with windmills.

In other words, the EPA wants the United States to adopt a policy that has proved to be a catastrophic failure in Spain.

Why hasn't the EPA spent its time insisting that deep-sea oil drillers have mechanisms and plans in place to deal with an explosion that results in oil gushing from a pipeline one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico?

The real answer is that there is no romance and little applause to be had from providing practical answers to inevitable calamities.

The romance lies in reengineering American society so that the leftists who provide the plans can determine how people live, what they buy, and when they die.

This plan is readily available. It's called the Obama agenda.

Goldman Sachs helped to blow up a 33-year-old social engineering project; now it must pay

Why is the Obama administration pursuing Goldman Sachs for enabling financial transactions between sophisticated, consenting adults?

Because the financial instruments at issue blew up a 33-year-old social engineering project that destroyed markets in pursuit of an unreachable liberal objective: universal home ownership.
Goldman Sachs devised those complex investments.

The campaign for universal home ownership began in 1977, when President Jimmy Carter secured enactment of the Community Reinvestment Act, which prohibited lenders from red-lining, a practice that denied home mortgages to residents of high-risk neighborhoods.

Over time, the CRA movement spilled out of its original constituency, the conspicuously compassionate, as radicals from ACORN and other activist organizations joined the fray, gaining legal sanction to browbeat bankers and picket lenders who refused to confirm to the growing demands for mortgage accomodation.

Still, the CRA remained a modest effort by federal government standards, From 1977 through 1991, only $8.8 billion was committed under the CRA. Then Democrat Bill Clilnton became president and business picked up. From 1992 through 2005, the first year of George Bush's second term, $4.2 trillion in CRA loans went out the door.

The concept of risk apparently had been erased from the mortgage industry. Local lenders could bend to pressure for loans and then wash their hands of risk by immediately selling those loans to Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, which were backed by the federal treasury and supported by the political class. That was the first step in the process of bundling mortgages as securities, a process that resulted in mortgages from Pequot Lakes and Tuscaloosa finding eager buyers in Madrid.

The U.S. housing market sizzled.

But one savvy investor, a hedge fund operator in New York, wasn't buying it. John Paulson studied records of the bundled mortgages and made a list of the ones he considered most likely to go bad through default. Then he persuaded Goldman Sachs to craft securities based on the suspect mortgages and bet against the market by selling them short. That is, he sold securities without first buying them.

Paulson's trading was prophetic. When the housing market collapsed, Paulson earned billions of dollars, closing out his transactions by buying back the Goldman Sachs securities for pennies on the dollar. He sold high, then bought low, reversing the usual process.

What troubles sophisticated observers is this. The securities that Paulson shorted were bought by sophisticated, willing investors. Neophytes don't participate in short sale transactions. So what's the problem? Why did the Securities and Exchange Commission vote, 3 to 2, in favor of legal action  against Goldman?

Here's a thought. In essence, the CRA was a colossal social engineering project. When it was enacted, and for many years thereafter, a high-risk borrower could get a loan only by paying a higher-than-average interest rates. In recent years, however, the CRA and subsequent legislation, court decisions and rabble rousing tactics reduced the reliance on interest rates as compensation for high risk.

During the Bush administration the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low that more and more high-risk borrowers could get loans. As social engineering, the CRA was a success story.

Now, the Obama agenda is largely made up of social engineering projects designed to overcome market forces and make scarce resources available to all, whether they want them or not, whether they can afford them or not. Obamacare, for instance, would force the young and healthy to buy health care insurance even though many would prefer to take their chances and spend their money on something else. One result will be more generational theft, with the young forced to buy insurance they will not need.

Coming soon: cap and trade, which will require consumers to alter preferences and manufacturers to bear increased costs, even though the science behind global warming theory has been thoroughly discredited. In recent years, global warming has become the most powerful social engineering project of our time.

But that project runs counter to market forces, which require least cost solutions. Cap and trade would raise costs, and prices, for many of the things people buy and use. To secure enactment, the Obama administration will have to use thuggish tactics, as it did to pass Obamacare, bribing members of congress to vote against the desires of their constituents.

The SEC's lawsuit against Goldman Sachs may cause opponents to think twice about going up against the White House.

White House admits cap-trade=social engineering

The White House has just acknowledged, implicitly, that the furore over climate change is rooted in social engineering - the pernicious, persistent tendency of elitists to mislead, fabricate and lie to persuade free citizens to submit to the policy preferences of elites.

Here is White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs: "The president's strong belief is that in order to transition ourselves away from our dependence on foreign oil and into a clean-energy economy, that we need a strong incentive to do that."

No mention of oceans boiling, glaciers melting or people being fried by sunlight. All we get is Obama providing "a strong incentive" for Americans to do something they are not presently inclined to do.

In other times and other places, this has been called fascism, socialism or dictatorship. Here it's just social engineering, but it's just as objectionable.

In Iraq, Bush sought a legacy as liberator

At long last President Bush has provided some significant insight into his costly commitment of fighting forces and treasure to the war in Iraq.

"I'd like to be a president {known} as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush told an interviewer in remarks released by the White House on Saturday. The recorded interview is to be stored in the Library of Congress and in a museum to be devoted to the Bush presidency.

A few questions are in order. When did the freeing of millions of people in foreign lands become an imperative for an American president? Was this the original intent of Bush's invasion of Iraq? Or did this become an expedient explanation after the Iraq war, a war of choice, became hugely unpopular with the American people?

Few have questioned Bush's overthrow of teh taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had given safe haven to al qaida leaders as they plotted the 9/11 attacks.

Bush's initial explanation of the follow-up invasion of Iraq was that dictator Saddam Hussaein possessed large stores of chemical weapons, and had shown a willingness to use them. Some chemical weapons were, indeed, found in Iraq, but not enough to persuade skeptics that they posed a serious threat to the United States or its interests.

As the years passed, and the Iraq war dragged on, popular disapproval of the war rose and approval ratings for Bush fell.

There is no precedemt for America to wage war simply to free foreign populations from unpopular regimes. Previously, that has happened as a consequence of American forces toppling regimes that had invaded American territory, as Japan did at Peael Harbor, or posed an existential threat to this country, as Germany did by waging war on commercial shipping during the runup to World War II.

As recently as a half-century ago, the limits on exercise of American power were clearly understood, having been at issue in one of the great individual confrontations of our time.

After leading American forces across Korea all the way to the Chinese border, Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued that he should push on into Communist China, and that the United States should even resort to the atomic bomb to subdue the regime.

President Harry Truman said no. Then MacArthur took his campaign public, and Truman removed him from command.

In recent decades, however, American politicians have become more and more brazen about using government hammers and enticements to pursue social engineering within our borders, seeking reults that the free market system had failed to provide. The current financial turmoil resulted directly from a 30-year campaign by Congress and outside groups such as ACORN to force banks to grant mortgages to borrowers who couldn't meet free market standards of credit-worthiness. The Bush administration contributed to the debacle through the Federal Reserve's long drive to lower interest rates.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration was pursuing social engineering even more ambitiously by toppling the government of Iraq, which had not directly attacked or threatened the United States.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Barack Obama was elected president notwithstanding indications that he would intrude government even more ambitiously than Bush into social and economic affairs that the framers thought should be guided by market forces.

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