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Is a productive Congress supposed to be a good thing? The 111th Congress was very busy, passing horrendous legislation that the vast majority of people opposed – that is why Nancy Pelosi is no longer the Speaker of the House.

‘Productive’ Congresses have been the greatest bludgeon used against liberty. The Hundred Days of the 73rd Congress, often cited as the most ‘productive’ Congress in history, was quite possibly the most harmful 100 days in American history. In just 100 days, Congress rammed through much of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, among the worst and most damaging legislation ever passed.

Likewise, the 89th Congress, which passed the bulk of President Johnson’s Great Society, is often praised for their ‘productivity.’ Is the government ever going to read us the score from the Great Society? Instead of ending poverty, the government scheme fostered dependence degradation. In fact, the Great Society played a seminal role in the destruction of minority families.

In contrast, the 52nd United States Congress, which sat for 13 months in their two year term, passed little of note. They weren’t concerned with “spreading the wealth around,” there was no imposition of “fairness,” and there was no debate over “tax cuts for the rich” because there was no income tax (and the sky didn’t even fall).

In the 1920s the government controlled 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. A law was passed limiting the height of buildings in Washington D.C. because government officials were worried that tall buildings would emphasize the irrelevancy of the government. If only we still had that ‘problem.’

With Obamacare passed, the government is poised to takeover 6 per cent of the economy in one fell swoop. ‘Productive’ should not be a compliment when applied to Congress. In fact, ‘productive’ is probably the worst thing a Congress can be. The last thing a Congress should do is hurry through masses of legislation, especially bills that no one has read.

Rather than ‘productive,’ Congress should be prudent. Every bill should be carefully considered, with arguments from all sides given voice. Elected officials should only vote on a bill when all alternatives have been considered. If that means less legislation is passed, all the better. Bring on a ‘do nothing’ Congress – for about the next hundred years.

A Non-Prediction

By Thomas Sowell

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington— and who can predict what politicians will do?

However, let me go out on a limb, and try to predict what politicians will not do.

What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.

Think about telling all the millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses: “I really messed you up but, hey, nobody’s perfect. So I’m going to leave things alone now.” In fact, that would be hard even to tell yourself.

If the stimulus isn’t working, the true believers have to believe that it is only because it hasn’t been tried long enough, or with enough money being spent.

There are always calls for the government to “do something” when things are going bad. Those who make such calls have almost never bothered to check out what actually happens when the government does something, as compared to what happens when the government does nothing.

It is not just free market economists who think the government can make a mess bigger with its interventions. It was none other than Karl Marx who wrote to his colleague Engels that “crackbrained meddling by the authorities” can “aggravate an existing crisis.”

The history of the United States is full of evidence on the negative effects of government intervention. For the first 150 years of this country’s existence, the federal government did not think it was its business to intervene when the economy turned down.

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R. Glenn Hubbard (no mention if he is related to L. Ron Hubbard), the dean of Columbia’s Business School, said, “I don’t blame the administration for being off in these forecasts…[the cause of the rise in unemployment is] a mystery.” Christina Romer, the leader of the President’s economic council chimed in with “we’ve done a lot of things to look at possible explanations.” This is not the making of an Agatha Christie novel.

Unraveling the ‘mystery’, the Obama administration has found the antidote. According to the Times, Obama’s plan is to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire. This move constitutes an enormous tax hike for small businesses, the largest employers in the United States. In addition, in order to get people back to work, Obama intends to extend welfare payments for the unemployed. What better incentive to find a job than the promise of more ‘free’ government money? Finally, the White House is in favor of a government-run fund to make loans to businesses. That makes sense – the government did work wonders in the housing market. Perhaps it can be as successful in the rest of the economy.

Some Democrats want to send the United States even farther down the socialist rat hole. According to Alan Blinder, a former Clinton hack, the only solution is… New-Deal style agencies. Blinder contends that the only way to battle unemployment is to put workers onto the public payroll. What could be better than rebuilding the Civilian Conservation Corps and other alphabet agencies? By Albert Einstein’s reasoning, you could say Democrats are insane.

As for the ‘mystery’ of unemployment, there’s no need to summon Sherlock Holmes. In this ‘whodunit’ there is an obvious perpetrator: the Democratic Party. Their big spending, government increasing policies have removed all confidence in the marketplace. It has come to the point where Las Vegas real estate mogul Steve Wynn said that he prefers to do business in China because the Communist Chinese government is more predictable than their American counterpart. In other words, Obama is following in FDR’s footsteps. With Roosevelt’s ever changing ‘experiments,’ there was never any certainty in the market. As a result, businesses did not expand, and thus, unemployment never went down. This only changed when the War broke out. After the United States entered the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration realized that they needed businesses to lead industrialization effort to equip the military. To do this, Roosevelt stopped his socialist experiments’ and got out of the way. Today, with bailouts, changing regulations that no one understands, a draconian tax code, enormous tax hikes only months away, non-stop anti-business rhetoric from Washington, and ever increasing government spending the climate in the capital is highly volatile. With such great uncertainty, businesses will not expand, new businesses will not be created, and Americans will remain unemployed. Mystery solved.