The Wall Street Journal's resident liberal columnist, Thomas Frank, penned his usual drivel today. The subject was how Obama Dead Eyes and his ilk should start using the active tense instead of the passive tense in marketing their fascist regulatory designs. So I jotted off the following letter to the WSJ.
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If Thomas Frank were Rip Van Winkle, perhaps we could forgive him his statement that the recent financial disaster was “brought about in no small part by either the absence of federal regulation or the amazing indifference of the regulators.”
Must we really rehash for Mr. Frank the eloquent explanations in the Journal’s pages over the last year on how regulations fostered, promoted and demanded irrational exuberance on the part of lenders and others for years? That is the nature of regulating invisible hands. As we have seen for more than 100 years in America, regulations never stop bad people from being bad; they stop good people from being productive.
All that said, I must finally find myself agreeing with Mr. Frank on one point: President Obama and the rest of his ilk should begin using the active voice instead of the passive voice in promoting their regulatory mindsets. After all, such regulation actively abridges the right to liberty in business that our Founders desired almost without exception. If Mr. Obama wishes to destroy, he must remain active.
There are two reasons, however, why Mr. Obama (and anyone else, for that matter) uses the passive voice: It subconsciously reflects a sense of immorality and/or mental lassitude; or it attempts to smudge lipstick on unpalatable oppression. I will not pretend to know which best describes our current commander-in-chief.
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