Speculators are a frequent target of big government, because speculators help bring about the consequences of bad government policy.  Greece, aided by the ever economically brilliant Barack Obama, is taking just this approach:

President Barack Obama has “responded positively” to calls to clamp down on market speculators, the Greek PM said after talks in Washington.

…Greece has blamed market speculators for worsening its current economic troubles.

European politicians have already expressed their concern over the issue.

“We ourselves were in the last few months the victims of speculators,” Mr Papandreou said, after meeting Mr Obama.

They are victims!  And how, exactly, have they been victimized?

They say speculators, such as hedge funds, are unfairly betting that Greece will default on its loans.

Such moves are making it more expensive for Greece to borrow funds.

The speculators are typically betting against Greece defaulting on its government bond payments – or having its credit rating lowered – by buying large quantities of a complex financial insurance instrument called a Credit Default Swap (CDS).

It unfortunately does not occur to them that speculators are “betting against Greeze defaulting on its government bond payments” because the policies of the Greek government have made it more likely that they will default on their bond payments.

This is what is supposed to happen.  Good policies get rewarded; bad policies get punished.

Speculators gain nothing by being wrong.  So often it is insinuated that they deliberately drive this or that down, that it’s bad to “bet against” some thing, and that the only reason it happens is because speculators are greedy.  Unless it’s oil, then they greedily bet it up.

There’s the rub.  It makes no difference to speculators which way anything moves, only that they guess right.  And because they have strong financial incentive to do so, they usually do.  This means their bets are a useful signal to the market.

Imagine if more evil, greedy speculators had bet against the U.S. financial markets in the mid 2000’s like Warren Buffet did.  Maybe there would have been a strong enough signal to correct the course before it was too late.

Obama’s siding with Greece against speculators is not surprising.  Not only does he harbor a fundamental antipathy to all things free market, but he understands that when the U.S. faces higher interest rates for borrowing in response to his irresponsible policies, he’ll be in a similar position of needing a scape goat.

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Some lefty in Philly has terrible advice for Obama that I really hope he listens to:

This may come as a surprise to some people, but the U.S. Constitution does not specify the size of the Supreme Court.

The original Judiciary Act of 1789 set the number of justices at six. It shrank to five in 1801. It expanded to seven in 1807. It grew to nine in 1837 and 10 in 1863. It fell back to seven in 1866. It returned to nine in 1869 and has remained at that number since.

Political issues accounted for the changes. The Federalists reduced the number to five, hoping to deprive Thomas Jefferson of an appointment. The incoming Democrats repealed that measure, raising the number to seven. It went to nine in 1837 to give Andrew Jackson two more seats. Civil War issues led to more fluctuations before the court settled at nine under President Ulysses Grant.

So if nine justices is not writ in stone, the embattled President Obama should deal with this hostile conservative/reactionary court by adding three members.

I can think of few things better to cement public opposition to an already unpopular President, and all but assure his defeat in the next election, than to engage in such a naked power grab.  I can say with complete confidence that there is no way this makes it through Congress, so there is no down side to hoping he tries.

Go for it, Barack! Yes, you can!

Hat-tip: HotAir

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Thanks to Heritage:

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The grand health care summit was supposed to trap Republicans.  Democrats would show the nation how intransigent and unreasonable those pesky obstructionists on the right were being as they prevented passage of free health care for all.  Instead, Republicans came prepared and ran substantive circles around the Democrats, who were too busy reading phony, heart-string pulling letters from “constituents” to talk about actual details of legislation.  The President seemed irritable and petty, and did little to help his case.

Despite accomplishing nothing, the President is determined to ram his unpopular bill through anyway.  All the talk is about reconciliation, which will avert a need for a 60 vote majority in the Senate, but the real story is in the House.  The Democrats just don’t have the votes right now.

Can that change? Certainly.  If House members realize their toast no matter what they do come November, they may just ram it through as one last thumb in the eye to the American people.  But right now, ObamaCare is looking like it needs to be fit for a coffin.

Does this mean any health care reform is dead?  Only if Democrats want it to mean that.  If they wake up, return hat in hand and have a real summit to discuss bipartisan solutions, some useful things can get done.  Don’t get me wrong, the best solutions are ones that Democrats will never consider, but there are productive things on which both sides can agree.   But that will mean Democrats have to first abandon their bad bill which no one wants.  I’m not holding my breath.

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Health care can be expensive.  There are lots of reasons why this is.  Some of them we don’t want to change, such as the fact that modern health care is capable of miracles.  Miracles aren’t cheap.  Other causes we don’t want to change, such as the fact that third-party payers eliminate normal market pressure to keep prices down.

Obama has another idea, however.  Control insurance prices!

President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system, White House officials said Sunday.

Two reasons this is dumb:

1) Price controls don’t work.  It’s like trying to legislate away gravity.  Michael Tanner explains some of the consequences:

Insurers unable to charge more for an increasingly expensive product can be expected to trim costs in one of two ways:

• They can drop their most expensive customers — in this case, the sickest, who consume the most health care. Many companies are already doing this, a major source of dissatisfaction with the health-care system. In fact, the president wants to prohibit companies from doing this.
• They can cut back on their reimbursement rates to hospitals and physicians. But neither doctors nor hospitals, any more than insurance companies, are willing to operate at a loss. If payments fall below their costs, they’ll simply stop taking patients. One only has to look at government programs like Medicare and Medicaid to see how this works.

2) Insurance prices go up because health care prices go up.  Not only is Obama attempting to apply the wrong remedy, but he’s targeting the wrong problem.  It’s stupidity squared.

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President Obama likes to assert that economists across the political spectrum agree that big government spending is necessary to fight off recession.  “Economists on the left and right,” he insisted early in 2009, “agree that the last thing the government should do during a recession is cut back on spending.”  Essentially, he’s saying that all economists are Keynesians.  This is simply false, as Harvard Professor Jeffrey Miron tells us today at the Daily Caller.

..That brings us to the second argument for higher spending: the Keynesian claim that spending stimulates the economy. If this is accurate, it might seem the U.S. should continue its high-spending ways until the recession is over.

But the Keynesian argument for spending is also problematic. To begin with, the Keynesian view implies that any spending—whether for vital infrastructure or bridges to nowhere—is equally good at stimulating the economy. This might be true in the short term (emphasis on might), but it cannot be true over the long haul, and many “temporary” programs last for decades. So stimulus spending should be for good projects, not “digging ditches,” yet the number of good projects is small given how much is already being spent.

More broadly, the Keynesian model of the economy relies on strong assumptions, so we should not embrace it without empirical confirmation. In fact, economists find weak or contradictory evidence that higher government spending spurs the economy.

Substantial research, however, does find that tax cuts stimulate the economy and that fiscal adjustments—attempts to reduce deficits by raising taxes or lowering expenditure—work better when they focus on tax cuts. This does not fit the Keynesian view, but it makes perfect sense given that high taxes and ill-justified spending make the economy less productive…

Recently, Obama again cited the entire spectrum of economists as supporters of his agenda: “Now, if you hear some of the critics, they’ll say, well, the Recovery Act, I don’t know if that’s really worked, because we still have high unemployment. But what they fail to understand is that every economist, from the left and the right, has said, because of the Recovery Act, what we’ve started to see is at least a couple of  million jobs that have either been created or would have been lost.”

Economist Robert Barro explains in the Wall Street Journal what a load that is.

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…you’re a Democratic President, but the Washington Post is plotting ways for you to leave office early.

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While most of the federal government was shut down on Monday due to the weekend’s blizzard (your humble blogger jas just got his internet service restored after 3 days, and has spent the afternoon unburying his mobile CO2 manufacturing unit), the President decided it was the perfect time to unveil his new office of doom-mongering Climate Service:

The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

“Whether we like it or not, climate change represents a real threat,” Locke said Monday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, “Climate change is real, it’s happening now.” She said climate information is vital to the wind power industry, coastal community planning, fishermen and fishery managers, farmers and public health officials.

This new propaganda service arrives on the scene just in time, as the AGW theory melts around us.

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I recount a year’s worth of race-mongering in my latest article on Big Government:

Barack Obama came into office with a promise of ushering in a new post-racial era.  One year into his term and Chris Matthews has already declared, “Mission Accomplished!”  He forgot Obama was black, you see.  America is now post-racial!  Sadly, the facts tell a very different story.  Over the last year, we have witnessed a proliferation of indiscriminate accusations of racism, or a period of what I like to refer to as hyper-racialism.

Check it out.

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The press won’t notice, as they’re too busy hailing his dishonest lecture session at the House Republican Retreat as the best Presidential performance since the last time he opened his mouth and they all swooned.  But we have video:

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