Democrats Repeat Mistakes with ACORN and public/private entanglements

Captain Ed on the decision to AGAIN make community organizations like ACORN part of the decision-making process on banking rules:

Congress has a duty to pass rational regulation that can be precisely and consistently enforced without “strategies” and agendas, or better yet, just provide resources to enforce the regulation we already have.

Business has a hard time recovering from a recession when there is no confidence that regulations on those businesses will be stable and predictable.

The second comment here puts this decision in slightly blunter terms:

So the new agency will be created in order to put administrative-law muscle behind a line-extension of the Democratic Party protection racket industry?

Why am I not even in the least bit surprised?

One of the flaws in FDR's governing strategy, which led him to unintentionally prolong the Great Depression, was his habit of changing the rules for running business. This practice was applied frequently to the financial industry which funded other businesses in a somewhat fickle and unpredictable way. Sometimes in a strikingly arbitrary way. Until the war concentrated everybody's minds.

Turning government rule-making for running businesses over to "community organizations" is another really effective way to increase the hesitancy of businesses to start new projects.

RELATED: Government has the right to cut the pay of executives of companies which receive government money. But cutting the pay of the best and brightest has unintended consequences.

UPDATE: financial institutions like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, whose financial disasters were more easily traced to government involvement, are different from those nasty capitalist banks. Bailouts of banks? Morally repugnant, even if necessary. Bailouts of Fannie and Freddie? Compassionate. Their head honchos don't need to become independent of the government or financially solvent before they can rake in the really big bucks, apparently. Then again, Fannie Mae didn't suffer much government criticism when the head honchos were caught doing Enron-style accounting to pad their bonuses a few years ago, either.

General Principle: Coercive government meddling in private business can lead to unintended concequences. Cutting the reimbursement of health care professionals to control costs is one key to the Democratic plans for health care reform. Wonder how many ex-physician lawyers and ex-nurse union bosses the country needs? Or ex-hospital worker stage hands? Or ex-physician stage hands? OR, maybe physicians can reverse lowered compensation after Obamacare by forming a union themselves so they can make as much as stage hands. Democrats love unions, especially in public/private entities.

BACKGROUND: A little more history on ACORN and the Government here. The latest on the "helping child sex-slavers" sting here. ACORN lied when they said that Hannah and James had been kicked out of ACORN's Philadelphia office. The gradual release of these videos has caught ACORN in several lies now. As James says in the post linked just above,

Alinsky Rule #1: “Power isn’t only what you have, it’s what the enemy thinks you have.”

Do you think it's fair for the Right to use the Community Organizing principles of the Left against them? On the flip side, progressive think tanks are becoming more powerful as a way to circumvent rules against lobbying. Not long ago, it was the conservative think tanks which were thought of as more intellectually influential in Washington - a major counterbalance to the liberals who predominated in Washington bureaucracy. Conservative think tanks had been largely staffed by people who were squeezed out of government and academia by liberal dominance.

The tactics in the struggle for power and influence in Washington do not remain static.