Menckenism

What do polar bears, orangutans, the Walt Disney Company, Cheetos, recycled fundraising schemes, and corporate shakedowns have in common? It’s just another day on the social activism front.

Skillful fundraisers have long used charismatic megafauna–cool, cute, cuddly creatures whose pictures make you go squishy inside–to collect money from donors concerned about the environment who want to feel like they are doing something. Nothing wrong with that—voluntarism is a great American tradition and we all have our pet causes. But when the money is used to break the law in order to harass image-conscious corporations into making payoffs or driving their suppliers out of business, it stops being fun and games.

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Every time a plane crashes, a team of engineers and aviation experts jump into action, methodically reconstructing the event to determine the cause—whether mechanical failure, bad design, pilot error, or poor aircraft maintenance. This painfully acquired knowledge is then immediately fed back into remediation programs for existing airplanes, while informing future aircraft designs. If negligent culpability is found, executives are cashiered and enormous damage claims are paid. The insurers that make these payouts then revise their policies, rates, and eligibility requirements. Airlines with consistently bad safety records disappear. As a result of this feedback, air travel is safer now that it has ever been in the history of aviation.

Compare this to what happens every time a stock market, currency, or national economy crashes. Teams of bankers, economists, and technocrats are dispatched by those in power—to deny responsibility and affix blame on rival bankers, economists, and technocrats. Financial engineers who examine the wreckage rarely agree on what caused the problem, and even when they do politicians ignore their recommendations if they find them unpalatable. Painfully acquired knowledge is usually dismissed because “this time is different.”

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Consider the following list: 1) Marry someone of your same gender, 2) join a harem, 3) have sex with your donkey, 4) kill your baby the moment before, during, or after delivery, 5) smoke a dried weed, 6) eat a fattened goose liver, 7) shop with plastic bags, and 8) buy a 32-ounce Coke at McDonalds.

Every one of these items has been in the news lately, skirmishes in the perpetual culture war that defines too much of contemporary politics. (I’m sure you can add a dozen more.) Each has engendered legal action, legislative wrangling, kitchen table debate, and bloviating punditry.

Where do you draw the line, and why? More importantly, how do we draw the line for others, and by what right?

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Join Crony Chronicles and students across the country in a tweet-up on Tuesday 12:30pm ET with entrepreneur and Forbes columnist @BillFrezza! #crony

Flight delays are piling up around the country because air traffic controllers are being forced to take days off due to budget cuts.

Those automatic cuts came as a result of the so-called sequester, when Congress could not reach a deal to trim deficit spending.

To watch Bill’s interview on this subject, click here.

Yes, it looks like a wedding announcement out of The Onion, but when it comes to making a killing off the never-ending “War on Poverty,” the marriage of convenience between the financial services industry and federal bureaucrats is no laughing matter.

The idea that government welfare programs could eliminate poverty, rather than temporarily alleviate its worst impacts during hard times, took root during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative. From modest beginnings, a panoply of federal welfare programs expanded and multiplied to the point where they now consume one-sixth of the federal budget—some $588 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

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A debate is raging among free market advocates regarding the proper posture to take with respect to Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks. This has become an increasingly important issue as the financial sector has grown to take up an unprecedented share of our economy. While cleaving to tried-and-true libertarian defenses of finance as vital to the economy, some of us fear that the machinations of the crony capitalists running the TBTF banks—in cahoots with their allies in the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve—will result in not only another global financial collapse, but a populist anti-capitalist backlash that could destroy what’s left of our free enterprise system.

But before we can tackle this problem, we must figure out what is really going on. In all public policy debates, perceptions matter, and public perceptions are often driven by the leading narratives that gain cultural acceptance. Let’s look at what these are.

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