Re: Krugman: Bush policies are disaster

From: Bulba! (bulba_at_bulba.com)
Date: 12/03/04 

Date: Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:07:27 +0100

On Mon, 06 Dec 2004 03:00:13 GMT, Gabrielle Rapagnetta
<cut-out@gmx.net:n0.spam> wrote:

>> Gabrielle Rapagnetta"
>[snip]
>>>Furthermore, you demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of Social
>>>Security. It is patently absurd to suggest that social security is a
>>>"major reason" for deficit spending since it is already paid for.
>
>Bulba! wrote:
>> The s.s. is not only not paid for, but it is "paid" for only by
>> increasing debts, making IOUs for which future generations
>> have to pay via taxes and reduced standard of living: had
>> this money not been spent by current retirees on consumption,
>> it would increase future productivity of labor. Had the current
>> retirees spent more income on investment in the past, they would
>> have lived a bit worse than they had, but the US would be richer
>> and more productive now, and that would be what their
>> retirement consumption would be paid from.

>You add to this fundamental misunderstanding. You fail to recognize
>that the money will be spent by current retirees on consumption whether
>it is public or private.

Since in your scheme there is no place whatsoever for the cycle of
savings and investments resulting in capital accumulation...

...I take it that the currently accumulated capital is result of
Martians dumping it into economy of USA from orbit.

>The effect on productivity of labor is the
>same. More on this below...

It's not. You merely take blatantly ideological, demonstrably
unrealistic assumptions (article from The Economist demonstrating
your assumptions about it are wrong is quoted at the end of posting)
and draw the conclusion that is wrong, but that you need in order to
see what you want to see.

>> Instead, they decided to skip the investment part altogether,
>> not save for the future, and consume now income acquired
>> from what economically is a tax, dumping the debts on their
>> children and grandchildren.

>The debt carried from SS's initial round of retirees is not burdensome.

How is it not burdensome if it's _consumption_? It simply has to be,
just like spending one's own wage on consumption is burdensome
to one's own bank account. Same as investment is burdensome,
but investment increases the capital stock and develops technology
and subsequently productivity of labor in the long run is increased.

Spending on consumption doesn't do that. Economically it matters
not a whit what is written on this or that part of consumption. The
current structure of govt spending is directed mostly at consumption
for "important social needs" or "social justice". It's just blowing
the money awy.

I'm supposed to suffer the fate of a prole by you, because you blowing
my money away on your progressive rubbish makes you feel good.

Well, Rapagnetta, go to hell, where you belong.

>And no one in their right mind is arguing that current retirees are not
>entitled to their full benefits.

I'd say that they're much like money counterfeiters: they weaved
their benefits out of the thin air, not from the previous investments,
so yes, I would argue that current retirees are not entitled to their
full benefits.

Theft is theft, even in practiced on future generations.

>> That is also what Delong is whining about when it comes
>> to BUDGET DEFICITS increasing PUBLIC DEBT.

>> However, he is NOT making the very same economic
>> argument WRT social security.
 
>> Why? Why is spending money NOW on consuming econ assets
>> instead of making investments bad when it is done by the
>> Federal Govt of Bush Jr., but not if the very equivalent thing
>> is done by Social Security?

>First of all, SS is not part of the public debt, which might explain
>your confusion about Delong. You are talking about national debt --
>there's a difference.

Definition of national debt:

"Treasury bills, notes, bonds, and other debt obligations that
constitute the debt owed by the federal government."

Yes, Rapagnetta, keep on explaining why duck no. 1 is
not really a duck even if it walks and quacks like a duck,
while duck no. 2 is a duck, yes, it's fine to criticize
this duck for the costs associated with it. Because
you see, the costs associated with duck no 2 have been
dumped by the society by the current president which
you don't like.

>Secondly, you are deceiving yourself by thinking that shifting SS to
>private equities will increase investment.

Now you show me the point where I have proposed such a measure,
if you define "private equities" as corporate securities that
Greenspan talks about below. In one jump you make this "minor"
mental shortcut from private equities simply buying corporate
stocks as necessary and exclusive way of investment via
private equity funds.

Or where I have argued that people saving the money themselves
will result in ONLY purchasing corporate stocks.

How about bond markets, from which the companies increasingly
and massively finance their projects. How about private equity
funds that do IPOs, do buyouts and mergers, provide venture
capital, carefully overlook corporations (the frauds like Enron
did not happen in corporations where significant stock was held
by a private equity fund for obvious reasons: unlike the individual
investor who holds tiny fraction of shares, the funds have both the
powerful motivation and the means for smelling creative accounting
in corporate HQ). Recent issue of The Economist has ran a cover
story on private equity funds. They simply do business, that's
not just "investment" in greater capitalization of stock exchange.

>As Greenspan tells it:

>"Unless new savings are created in the process, the corporate securities
>that displace Treasury securities in the social security trust funds
>must be exactly offset by the mirror image displacement of corporate
>securities by government securities in private portfolios, probably
>largely in private funds held for retirement. This swap is essentially a
>zero sum game. To a first approximation, aggregate retirement
>resources--from both social security and private funds--do not change."

Well, great. It's just Greenspan is not talking about money spent
on actual investments in the real economy, like many private
equity firms demonstrably do, he's talking about private funds
buying govt papers or simply increasing capitalization of the stock
exchange.

>What the shift does increase is risk and inefficiency. Basically what
>you are doing is attempting to justify the hijacking of America's
>retirement funds. The motivation here for the so-called 'reformists' is
>to create a powerful and dangerous political tool, which is exactly what
>a fed-managed equity fund would be. Money managers (like these:
>http://www.opensecrets.org/presidential/contrib.asp?id=N00008072&cycle=2004)
>profit from the returns while the taxpayers are burdened with the risk.

More like we see yet another pathetic, incoherent conspiracy theory,
that is demonstrably out of sync with facts that can be acquired after
5 minutes of using Google - and that is out of sync with the powerful
critics of the "pay as you go" retirement systems IN PRINCIPLE,
like Milton Friedman, or recently, Paul Samuelson eating his previous
words.

Why don't you admit that you merely lie and want us all to suffer the
downsides of this crock, because it feeds your cretinous collectivist
sentiments? Even though it has demonstrable and critical economic
downsides as well as serious injustice built into it?

Remind you: the federal law in America FORBIDS ANY PRIVATE
RETIREMENT FUND TO OPERATE ON THE PRINCIPLE LIKE
SOCIAL SECURITY IS USING, namely "pay as you go".

It's a fraud to do that.

>> For instance:

>> "Mises' 1949 comments on Social Security and government debt read as
>> if they had been written yesterday: "Paul in the year 1940 saves by
>> paying one hundred dollars to the national social security
>> institution. He receives in exchange a claim which is virtually an
>> unconditional government IOU. If the government spends the hundred
>> dollars for current expenditures, no additional capital comes into
>> existence, and no increase in the productivity of labor results. The
>> government's IOU is a check drawn upon the future taxpayer. In 1970 a
>> certain Peter may have to fulfill the government's promise although he
>> himself does not derive any benefit from the fact that. Paul in 1940
>> saved one hundred dollars.... The trumpery argument that the public
>> debt is no burden because 'we owe it to ourselves' is delusive. The
>> Pauls of 1940 do not owe it to themselves. It is the Peters of 1970
>> who owe it to the Pauls of 1940.... The statesmen of 1940 solve their
>> problems by shifting them to the statesmen of 1970. On that date the
>> statesmen of 1940 will be either dead or elder statesmen glorying in
>> their wonderful achievement, social security."(pp. 847-848)"
>>
>> Mises was a fucking prophet, what can I say.

>And you are not.

Oh gee, I feel so bad bc of that - the problem is, Mises, Samuelson
and Friedman have argued before me on this issue in the way
you don't want to see.

Your unwillingness to FACE THE ISSUE that Mises is talking
about and merely blabbering childish ad hominems is noted.

It is you who demonstrably has a problem with a serious argument
and a real world. Not me.

>Mises is arguing for abolishing Social Security.

Again, you try to obfuscate the issue: he has been explaining
why it is a bad idea.

It is a VERY bad idea. Don't take my word for it: consult
e.g. argumentation of Milton Friedman. In detail. How
scummy and harmful scheme that is.

>You
>are welcome to argue for that too if you can manage to find a couple
>trillion dollars loose change in your pockets.

Those are thieves like you who have been continually stealing the
money massively from workers and investors. Not me.

I'm young. Every fucking month, my govt takes away almost
half of my wage for s.s. "contributions" (and that's before
the income tax, and that's not including 22% VAT of most
products). The money goes to pay the current retirees instead
of doing investment with that money.

Why? Hell, why not! It feels good to the current retirees, that's
for sure.

Unemployment in the meantime skyrockets and there is
no way out of this trap. There simply is none, unless the
govt obligations are simply dropped just like that. In
short, govt would have to declare bankrupcy in order
to shake off the bad economic effects that will remain
there for decades even IF, I stress even IF, the govt
would start to reduce its debts instead of continuing
increasing them.

Welcome to the future of social democracy, Rapagnetta.
It's your ilk that produced this horrible mess.

It's very nice to go to the bank, get a credit, spend it
on consumption and then burden someone else with
the debt. Sure it feels great. That's what leftist scum
like you have been doing.

The only reason you get away with it is bc the Ponzi scheme
has not yet crumbled, but it is currently in the phase of
people "starting losing faith in it". Demographic change
is what triggered the cold realization in the minds of
people that smth can get wrong. And indeed, it will go
VERY wrong.

>Instead, you are arguing for larger government, although you don't
>realize it.

You're too stupid to deceive me, Rapagnetta, even if you're stupid
enough to deceive yourself.

>You are talking about putting the nation's retirement
>savings into an equity fund which is subject to political pressure.

In reality, being a complete idiot, you're so blind as not to
see your own idiotic way of excusing your sorry ideology
that is based on literally dozens of errors in reasoning,
a few examples follow:

1. Why is that only govt would do saving and investment?
Why on earth does the govt has to arrange the economy
in such way that it ends up with money instead of with
private economy and private investment - and I do not
mean just driving the price of corporate stocks up?

You know why. You just don't want to admit it. For once,
e.g. Eisner has admitted it.

2. "Subject to political pressure" - I have bad news
for you, Rapagnetta: s.s. benefits are NOT guaranteed
at all. If US Congress decided tomorrow to slash the
benefits tomorrow, it is LEGAL for it to do so.

The benefits will have to be cut. There is no way
for them not to be cut without killing the economy
of the country, and that means that sooner or later
millions of the retirees will have to have their
incomes significantly reduced. Probably a combination
with increase in taxes will follow.

Economists agree: in the future there will be no way
to manage s.s. but to slash the benefits, increase
taxes, or do some combination of both.

Hell, in this country s.s. benefits are constitutionally
guaranteed to be updated for inflation - but when the
crunch came, it was VERY close, with some SOCIAL
DEMOCRATIC politicians openly talking about the
need of reducing the s.s. benefits. The only way
that saved it was the economy didn't ultimately
die, but barely survived.

Govt is no economic Jesus, Rapagnetta, and it is
not exempt from the laws governing economy even
if the politicians think so or don't care: if it gobbles
too big fraction of economy up, very bad things happen.
No matter how much you tweak with 50 definitions of
the debt.

>The
>current pay-as-you-go system is far less intrusive.

In the Pink Universe of Leftist Paradise maybe. Not
in ugly real world.

>Once again, it is the rightwinger arguing to increase state control.

Once again, you prove to be a complete idiot.

>> One of the debatants on Delong's site was honest enough
>> to admit what was the motivation:
>>
>> "We have the system we have (which is the same as every other
>> country's social security system) because when it was established no
>> one who got benefits had paid into it. To do otherwise would have
>> required waiting a generation for the assets to accumulate. The social
>> security system is not a shell game. It was designed and must be
>> designed as a pay-as-you-go system."
>>
>> Read that? Again: "To do otherwise would have required waiting a
>> generation for the assets to accumulate."
>>
>> Yes. It's an inter-generational Ponzi scheme. No different in
>> economic effects from current budget deficit of Bush, "cut
>> taxes, but not spending".
>
>Americans have paid more into the Defense Department's mysterious black
>budget than it has Social Security. It's not a ponzi scheme and there's
>not a baby boomer alive who would trade her future social security
>benefits for what she paid to her mother's.

>If you really feel like championing the cause of increased productivity
>then you will stop supporting politicians who run massive deficits.

After you stop advocating massive fraud, theft and economic
damage done by the very nature of the government spending.

Remember: economists basically agree that just about any
tax is a distortion of economy (that's obviously assuming
that money from the taxes will be spent in 100%). 

----
The new kings of capitalism
Nov 25th 2004
>From The Economist print edition
In two decades, private-equity firms have moved from the outer fringe
to the centre of the capitalist system. But, asks Matthew Bishop, can
they keep it up?
“IF YOU made ‘Private Equity: the Movie', then Michael Douglas would
have to play Schwarzman.” The head of one multi-billion-dollar
private-equity firm is talking about the head of another, the
Blackstone Group's Steve Schwarzman. “I'm joking,” he adds quickly,
“Steve and I are good friends.” Perhaps he realises that comparisons
with the fictional Wall Street banker famously portrayed by Mr
Douglas, Gordon “greed is good” Gekko, are not what his industry needs
just now. In fact, Hollywood has already set its sights on the men who
run this enormous, relatively unaccountable pool of capital. This
year, the Carlyle Group, a huge private-equity firm, has been vilified
in Michael Moore's film “Fahrenheit 9/11”, as well as being named as
the inspiration for a fictional private-equity firm that tries to
install its brainwashed candidate as American president in the remake
of “The Manchurian Candidate”.
Yet to study firms such as Blackstone is as good a way as any to find
out what is going on at the sharp end of capitalism today. Hedge funds
may be sexier, at least for now, but it is surely Mr Schwarzman and
his peers in the private-equity industry who control the really smart
money and wield the lasting influence. This survey will explain what
they do, what challenges they face and what effect they have on the
world of business at large.
In 1985, when Blackstone was founded by Mr Schwarzman and Pete
Peterson, a former commerce secretary under Richard Nixon, private
equity was a cottage industry that few people had heard of. There had
always been family-owned private firms, but family owners did not
usually aim to sell off the business; they passed it on to the next
generation.
Until the late 1970s, the main activity in private equity—buying
shares in private companies in the hope of selling them at a higher
price later—had been carried out mostly by the investment arms of a
few wealthy families, such as the Rockefellers and Whitneys in
America, and had generally been confined to venture-capital investment
in small, fast-growing businesses. America's venture capitalists have
become the envy of the world for developing firms such as Intel and
Google from nothing more than a bright idea into big, successful
companies. But these days less than one-fifth of the money the
industry raises goes on providing venture capital for young firms.
Much the larger part of private-equity money is spent on buy-outs of
established companies.
The first of today's big private-equity firms, Warburg Pincus, was
formed only in the late 1960s, and had to raise money from investors
one deal at a time. By the late 1980s private equity had grown big
enough to be noticed by the general public, but it made hostile
headlines with a wave of debt-financed “leveraged buy-outs” (LBOs) of
big, well-known firms. The industry was cast in the role of
irresponsible “corporate raider” attacking from the wilder fringes of
capitalism. A bestselling book by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar about
the $25 billion battle in 1988 for RJR Nabisco branded two
private-equity firms, Forstmann Little and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
(KKR), as “Barbarians at the Gate”.
Today, the private-equity industry has moved from the fringe to the
centre of the capitalist action. In the process, the leaders of
private equity have earned themselves both wealth and respect—if not
always respectability. The fabulously rich Mr Schwarzman pops up in
the society gossip pages for such things as paying a record $37m for a
Manhattan apartment and for demolishing his Florida mansion, allegedly
without permission. He is often tipped as treasury secretary in a
Republican administration.
A magnet for the best
In the 1980s private equity was a place for mavericks and outsiders;
these days it attracts the most talented members of the business,
political and cultural establishment, including many of the world's
top managers. Jack Welch, the legendary former boss of GE, is now at
Clayton, Dubilier & Rice. Lou Gerstner, who revived IBM, is chairman
of Carlyle. Even Bono, the saintly lead singer of rock band U2, is now
in the business.
Moreover, as Hollywood has noticed, private-equity firms have become
the employer of choice for politicians and government officials
returning to the private sector. Blackstone has hired Paul O'Neill,
until recently America's treasury secretary. Carlyle has provided
lucrative work for numerous luminaries, including George Bush senior,
Fidel Ramos, a former president of the Philippines, John Major, a
former British prime minister, and Arthur Levitt, a former chairman of
America's main financial-markets regulator, the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC).
Private equity's transformation into a mainstream industry has been
greatly helped by a fundamental change in the sort of deals it does.
In the late 1980s, funds often borrowed to the hilt to pay for
buy-outs, many of which were seen as hostile by the management of the
intended targets. Nowadays the buy-out firms' deals involve much less
debt. When KKR bought America's Safeway supermarket chain in 1986, it
borrowed 97% of the $4.8 billion the deal cost it; now a
private-equity firm would typically have to stump up around one-third
of the purchase price.
Hostile deals are now extremely rare. Even Britain's Philip Green, one
of a small band of powerful individual private-equity financiers,
declined to go hostile this year in his bid to buy Marks & Spencer, a
British retailer. Indeed, big companies that would once have turned up
their noses at an approach from a private-equity firm are now pleased
to do business with them. Royal Dutch/Shell, a troubled oil giant, has
been negotiating the sale of its liquefied-natural-gas business for
$2.45 billion to KKR and Goldman Sachs Capital. Some companies even
team up with private-equity firms, as Sony recently did with Texas
Pacific Group (TPG) and Providence Equity Partners to buy MGM, a film
studio.
Having largely shed the image of corporate wreckers, private-equity
firms can now plausibly describe themselves as providing a safe haven
in which firms can pursue long-term growth, sheltered from the
short-term storms of the public stockmarkets. This role is all the
more important because both venture capitalists and buy-out firms work
increasingly with firms undergoing big changes. Well-known firms that
have recently been “nurtured” by private equity include Burger King,
Polaroid, Universal Studios Florida, Houghton Mifflin, Bhs, Ducati
Motor and the Savoy Group.
Private-equity firms can also reasonably claim to offer a solution
(though an expensive one) to the corporate-governance problems that
have blighted so many public companies. “If you examine all the major
corporate scandals of the past 25 years, none of them occurred where a
private-equity firm was involved,” noted Henry Kravis, one of the
founders of KKR, in a recent speech. Private-equity firms, he said,
are “vigilant in our role as owners, and we protect shareholder
value.” On the other hand, if there were any impropriety in a private
company, the public might not get to hear about it.
Clearly, private equity is now a big business. In Britain, for
instance, one-fifth of the workforce outside the public sector is
employed by firms that are, or have been, invested in by a
private-equity firm, according to the British Venture Capital
Association. Worldwide, there are more than 2,700 private-equity
firms, reckons Goldman Sachs (maybe many more, because in this private
world small firms can easily drop below the radar screen). As pension
funds, endowments and rich individuals have become increasingly keen
investors, the amount of private equity has soared. In 2000 alone, the
peak year so far, investors committed about $160 billion to
private-equity firms (much of it to venture capital), up from only $10
billion in 1991.
At the same time, there has been a dramatic growth in the size of
private-equity funds, and in the size of the top firms that manage
them. Most private-equity firms raise funds as limited partnerships.
The firm is the general partner that manages the fund and gets paid an
annual fee (a percentage of the money in, or promised to, a fund) and
later a large slice of any profits; outside investors (who often lock
up their money for up to ten years) become limited partners who share
only in the profits.
In 1980, the world's biggest fund (KKR's) was $135m. Today there are
scores of funds with over $1 billion each. J.P. Morgan's latest one is
currently the biggest, at $6.5 billion, ahead of Blackstone's (see
chart 2, next page); Permira has Europe's largest, at around $6
billion at today's exchange rate. A $10 billion fund can be only a
matter of time, if only for the fabulous annual fees.
Blackstone, which started life as a two-man band working from a single
room, has become, in its own words, “a major player in the world of
finance”. It employs over 500 people in plush offices in New York's
Park Avenue, Boston, Atlanta, London, Paris and Hamburg. The 35-40
firms in which it has a private-equity stake together have over
300,000 employees and annual revenues of over $50 billion—which, were
they lumped together as a single conglomerate, would make Blackstone a
top-20 Fortune 500 company. Other big private-equity firms can point
to similar numbers. TPG's portfolio of firms has 255,000 staff and
collective annual revenues of $41 billion; Carlyle's has 150,000
workers and revenues of $31 billion.
Yet the private-equity industry must now grapple with tough new
challenges. These fall into three broad and overlapping categories:
generating good financial performance; coming up with winning
strategies in a rapidly maturing industry; and becoming more
accountable to the public, and thus less private.
There are few industries in which the gap between the best and the
rest is as large as in private equity. The top firms have delivered
far better returns to investors than the stockmarkets have done, but
the average private-equity fund has actually produced worse results
(after fees) than public equities. That includes buy-out funds as well
as the venture-capital funds that destroyed so much capital during the
tech bubble a few years ago.
In future, the industry may find it hard to match even this
not-too-glittering past performance. Private equity may become a
victim of its own success. Techniques such as seeking to maximise
cashflow, using debt astutely and paying managers with shares, which
were novel when private-equity firms first introduced them in the
1970s, have become standard business practice. As Mr Kravis put it in
his recent speech, “Everything we have accomplished in driving
corporate excellence makes it harder for us to achieve the returns
that our investors expect from us.”
A crucial factor will be whether private-equity firms can genuinely
improve the companies they buy. Another will be how easily they can
dispose of their investments. Without an “exit”, there can be no
profits. Two main exit routes—selling a firm to a big corporate buyer
or floating it on a public stockmarket through an initial public
offering (IPO) of its shares—have recently been much harder to pursue
than in the past; and increasingly popular alternatives, such as
selling to another private-equity firm, are becoming controversial.
Much will depend on how investors respond. On one hand, many have been
disappointed at private-equity firms' average past performance; on the
other, at a time when bonds and public equities are delivering
historically low yields, the high returns generated by the best
private-equity firms look increasingly enticing. European
institutional investors, which have traditionally invested little in
private equity, are beginning to show more interest. If investors pump
more capital into an industry that arguably already has too much of
it—especially now that hedge funds, flush with cash, are also piling
into private equity—there is every chance of creating another bubble,
hot on the heels of the one in venture capital.
Not only are good opportunities becoming harder to find, but being a
maturing industry throws up other tricky issues. Many of the leading
private-equity firms are still run by their founders, who are now
getting to an age where they have to consider bowing out. As is often
the way with charismatic founders, some may linger too long. And even
when they go, the handover may prove highly disruptive as some of
those passed over for the top job leave the firm. Nor can there be any
guarantee that the next generation, clutching their MBAs, will inherit
the deal-making magic of the founders.
Piggy in the middle
Will tougher competition and increasingly demanding investors cause
the industry to consolidate? Sir Ronald Cohen of Apax Partners thinks
that over the next decade the private-equity industry will polarise.
At one end, a few big global industry leaders will emerge—“maybe three
or four dominant brands with high returns”; at the other, small
specialist firms will thrive. In the middle, however, many firms will
find it hard to compete. His prediction is plausible, and the losers
may include some famous names. Forstmann Little has already said that
it will close in 2006. It made some awful telecoms investments during
the bubble and has failed to resolve its succession problem.
Some of the biggest private-equity firms are already staking out
different territories. KKR and Apax say they will continue to
concentrate on private equity. But Blackstone and Carlyle have been
adding other financial products to their portfolio. Blackstone, for
example, which has long run property funds, is toying with starting a
hedge fund as well as beefing up its existing business providing
advice on mergers and acquisitions. Diversification, these firms hope,
will help them to exploit their expertise and brands—and perhaps to
generate a more stable stream of profits that may allow them to float
on the stockmarket one day. But critics ask whether there is any real
synergy between the different sorts of “alternative assets” they
offer.
Will private-equity firms be able to maintain their privacy when
transparency is increasingly expected in every walk of life? The
answer may depend on politics as much as on economics. Most
private-equity firms fiercely oppose greater transparency, arguing
that it will rob them of their magic. Many tacitly accept that their
performance will soon become subject to much more intense scrutiny,
and that they will have to adopt sensible industry standards for
valuing their portfolios. But they are desperate to avoid having to
disclose details about the performance of individual firms in their
portfolios. Such disclosure, they say, would quickly subject those
companies to the same sort of damaging short-term pressures that they
would face in the public equity markets.
But change is on its way, if only because of the growing amount of
money being invested in private equity through public pension funds.
In America, freedom of information acts have prompted some public
pension funds to provide details of the performance of their
investments in different private-equity firms, to the horror of most
of the firms concerned. Yet, as Thomas Lee, founder of the eponymous
private-equity firm, concedes, “We are using so much public money that
we have an obligation if not to be transparent then to be a little
less invisible than in the past.” How much less invisible will be
explored later in this survey. But first, a quick look at past form.
--
Life without liberty is not worth living.
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