Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
This is the problem with putting the fox to guard the henhouse. Those guys at the SEC all CAME from Wall Street and/or are hoping to get fat jobs on Wall Street after their stint at the SEC. Can anyone actually believe they'd push very hard to prosecute the guys they drink martini lunches with and hope to get favors from later?
And just one more reason why concentrating all power of governance into a single, corrupt, entity is an inherently bad idea from the get go. You can't divorce the corruption from the central government, it is part and parcel, part of its DNA you might say. It's always been that way and always will be that way.
I invited them to dine with me, and after dinner, sitting at our wine, having settled our question, other conversation came on, in which a collision of opinion arose between Mr. Adams and Colonel Hamilton, on the merits of the British Constitution, Mr. Adams giving it as his opinion, that, if some of its defects and abuses were corrected, it would be the most perfect constitution of government ever devised by man. Hamilton, on the contrary, asserted, that with its existing vices, it was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; and that the correction of its vices would render it an impracticable government. And this you May be assured was the real line of difference between the political principles of these two gentlemen. Another incident took place on the same occasion, which will further delineate Mr. Hamilton's political principles. The room being hung around with a collection of the portraits of remarkable men, among them were those of Bacon, Newton and Locke. Hamilton asked me who they were. I told him they were my trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced, naming them. He paused for some time: “The greatest man,” said he, “that ever lived, was Julius Caesar.” Mr. Adams was honest as a politician as well as a man; Hamilton honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush (1811)
Thanks to the 17th Amendment, we now have a House of Lords (Senate) and a House of Commons in line with Hamilton's vision of what they should be. We also have a powerful central government replete with all of the corrupt vices of that system as well - also in line with Hamilton's thoughts on the matter. In 1770, Prime Minister William Pitt in a speech to the House of Lords said, "Unlimited power is apt to corrupt the minds of those who possess it". What "progressives" have been all about for the last century is unlimited power at the national level. They should not, therefore, be surprised at the corruption that has tagged along for the ride. It should be expected and accepted as part of the price they are willing to pay to have a national government because no national government has ever existed in which it was absent, and according to Hamilton, to remove the corruption from it would render it an impracticable one.
The solution to crappy government regulation is to have no government regulators at all.
Did he really say that? He must have editted that part.
No, he has never been known to be that succinct. But if you actually manage to unfurl all the curlicues and babble, he's basically saying it's the progressive's fault for giving government the power to regulate.
Not what I said at all, is it AV. No, what I said was that if you advocate for national government you should be prepared to accept the inevitable corruption which accompanies it since removing the corruption would render the national government you seek impracticable as a means of governance.
We'll skip over the redefining of what was meant by "regulating" commerce when the Constitution was penned by the national government advocates - that has been covered extensively already. Suffice to say it didn't mean micromanaging every aspect of commerce as the modern "progressives" seem to believe.
PrintSmith wrote: Not what I said at all, is it AV. No, what I said was that if you advocate for national government you should be prepared to accept the inevitable corruption which accompanies it since removing the corruption would render the national government you seek impracticable as a means of governance.
Hogwash. Even if I "advocated" for "national government" (what nutty blog did you pick up that term from, anyway?) the second part of your sentence is totally unsupportable and a non sequitur to boot.
We'll skip over the redefining of what was meant by "regulating" commerce when the Constitution was penned by the national government advocates - that has been covered extensively already. Suffice to say it didn't mean micromanaging every aspect of commerce as the modern "progressives" seem to believe.
Only you could define prosecuting (or failing to) the largest thefts and frauds in the history of the world as "micromanaging"!
PrintSmith wrote: Not what I said at all, is it AV. No, what I said was that if you advocate for national government you should be prepared to accept the inevitable corruption which accompanies it since removing the corruption would render the national government you seek impracticable as a means of governance.
Hogwash. Even if I "advocated" for "national government" (what nutty blog did you pick up that term from, anyway?) the second part of your sentence is totally unsupportable and a non sequitur to boot.
We'll skip over the redefining of what was meant by "regulating" commerce when the Constitution was penned by the national government advocates - that has been covered extensively already. Suffice to say it didn't mean micromanaging every aspect of commerce as the modern "progressives" seem to believe.
Only you could define prosecuting (or failing to) the largest thefts and frauds in the history of the world as "micromanaging"!
:VeryScared: :VeryScared: :VeryScared:
The Printsmith position has been staked and now the rationalization will begin. This should be entertaining to watch.
