get hawks in the House—led by John Shadegg and Jeff Flake of Arizona and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania—are making any effort to handcuff the profligate congressional appropriators.
The congressional response to the corporate-accounting scandals hasn’t steadied investor-class jitters much either. Just the opposite, in fact. What started as a crusade for tougher antifraud penalties and sensible accounting regulations has evolved, in tone, into something resembling a lynch mob. Now our congressmen are Big Business bashers, and their ultimate aim appears to be to stifle the golden goose of free market capitalism that created $32 trillion of new wealth in the 1980s and ’90s. Clamping down on corporate criminals is fine, but that needs to be combined with a positive agenda of growth-oriented tax cuts, deregulation, and free-trade policies. No one in the White House or on Capitol Hill has made this case.
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