As always here on Logipundit.com we want you to know that there is more than two ways to look at a subject, and that it occasionally might require us to use our imagination (and well…brains)  to come up with alternative solutions.

For instance, let’s imagine for a second that our Congress had authority over our economy…which if I’m not mistaken was the way our Constitution was originally intended.  Second, let’s pretend that whoever is in charge has FISCAL authority, and not simply MONETARY tools with which to manipulate our financial system.

And let’s further go down the yellow brick road and pretend that it might be a good idea to make our country even MORE economically competitive (and attractive to outside investment) by NOT trying to tax our producers to death.

If we were to live in this dream world, then the following article from NRO might represent an alternative to just forking out $700 BILLION of taxpayer money for Bureaucrats in Washington to have “tight controls” over our financial institutions:

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) chairs the Republican Study Committee, the congressional caucus of idea-driven, free-market stalwarts. These practicing Reaganites seem appalled to watch their GOP president morph before their eyes from GWB to LBJ to FDR. At a Capitol Hill press conference at high noon on Tuesday, Hensarling and a dozen RSC members expressed deep misgivings about Bush’s $700-billion baby. Preferring to drown it in the bathwater, Hensarling and his band of true believers rejected Bush’s collectivism and offered their own proposals for escaping this rubble — and returning America to a path of robust growth:

Give the capital-gains tax a two-year vacation. “Suspending capital gains taxes would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market,” Hensarling predicts. Also, as the Tax Foundation proposes, cutting America’s 35-percent corporate tax — the industrialized world’s second highest, after Japan’s — would boost U.S. global competitiveness. Since equity prices partially reflect long-term after-tax profits, lowering corporate levies should buoy stock markets.

Denationalize, then privatize Fannie and Freddie. “These troubled financial Frankensteins — created in a government laboratory — are not creatures of the free enterprise system,” Hensarling said. “We must ultimately take their monopoly powers away and return them to the marketplace.” Why not array Fannie’s and Freddie’s loans according to mortgage holders’ surnames? They then could be divided alphabetically into 26 units and auctioned off.

Waive “mark-to-market” accounting. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau argues, when distressed mortgage-backed securities sell at bargain-basement prices, unhelpful new bookkeeping regulations require that similar instruments elsewhere — including viable loans — be valued at equally low prices. This needlessly stains balance sheets.

Strengthen the dollar. Bernanke should boost U.S. currency, not pose as America’s uber-stock broker. A strong dollar lowers inflation, cheapens oil, and soothes world markets.

Sounds crazy, people who profess to be proponents of Free Markets actually proposing alternative legislation to keep our markets free. As the article goes on to point out, nothing can be less imaginative than the Bush plan to simply buy “troubled assets.”

Meanwhile, as of a few hours ago, a bunch of “Bi-partisan” big government schmuckheads swore they were getting “close to a deal.”

Nothing scares me more than “Bi-partisanship” in today’s Congress. The next time I hear the terms “Bi-partisan” or “reach across the aisle,” I think there is not enough duct tape on the planet to keep my head from exploding.

I went from being in a really great mood because the State of Oklahoma has stood up to the Fed and expressed their respective sovereignty under the Constitution…

…right back down to Earth having to listen to this:

Our Republican friends also talk about the need to, you know, set up ways in which the material can be refined; refineries. Well, do we own refineries? No, the oil companies own refineries.

Should the people of the United States own refineries? Maybe so. Frankly I think that’s a good idea. Then we could control the amount of refined product much more capably that gets out on the market.

…

Reporter: I’ve got a question about the issue of — you mentioned the issue of nationalizing refineries and having nationally owned refinery capacity. A lot of other countries have nationalized their oil industry. You mentioned that the oil and gas companies may not want to drill on these lands, so that they can take advantage of ever- higher gas prices. Is there any thought to having bills that would nationalize some of these refineries or start a national oil company?…

… REP. HINCHEY: Yeah, there’s thought going on about this. Frankly, this is something that I think is essential. And I think it’s only a matter of time before it takes place. I think that the — we’ll — what we have to do has to be in the interest of the American people, primarily, basically, in the interest of the American people, not in the interest of some major corporations. And the determination as to how much of this very important material gets refined, and consequently out on the market, is in the hands of the oil companies. And they just do. They make those decisions based upon their efforts to drive up the price as high as they can and keep it as high as they can for as long as they can.

So I think that this is something that this Congress should be thinking about. And certainly it’s something that I’m thinking about, and I think that there are a few others already in the Congress who are thinking about it as well.

REP. EMANUEL: Let me just add one thing — and then I you know have a question, and then we got to get going — is as it relates to the refinery issue, there’s been a tremendous amount of incentives, tax and otherwise, given to the oil and gas companies to expand or build new ones.

As I — now I’m a little on weaker grounds. I think it’s been, what, 20 years since a new refinery has been built.

REP. : Yeah.

REP. EMANUEL: And then clearly, the need is there. They haven’t met that. And I think whether you support or don’t nationalization, the question is what it is going to take to get the energy industry, given that we’ve given both direct and otherwise assistance, to build more refining capacity.

Hat tip to The Swamp.

A couple of SLIGHT details that our friends in the House are leaving out of this casual nationalization talk:

Some countries that have nationalized their oil industries: Mexico, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Models of Progressivism all.

Plus, is everyone forgetting that Europeans (TRUE models of Progressive energy policies and global friendliness) pay about 4 times as much as we do for gasoline (or at least they did; it’s probably more like three times as much now).

Here’s a good article about the risks of oil nationalization.

Meanwhile, Rasmussen tells us that only 47% of Americans are fully opposed to nationalization of our oil industry.

Got this in my email inbox today from none other than Richard Viguerie:

To this day I’m proud of my association with Ron Paul.

 

I’m equally proud of my association with Woody Jenkins, who is running for Congress in a special election just three weeks away.

 

I hope you’ll join me in supporting Woody Jenkins:

 

https://www.digitaldonation.com/donate.aspx?campid=1277

 

I’ve known Woody Jenkins for about as long as I’ve known Dr. Paul – roughly 35 years.

 

Woody is widely considered one of the brightest, most articulate conservative leaders in the country.

 

And when I learned he was running for Congress I thought it was too good to be true.

 

Woody earned a national reputation while serving for 28 years in the Louisiana statehouse.

 

He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996 against Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu. The razor-thin election – marred by massive New Orleans vote fraud – is considered by many to have been stolen.

Does anyone remember that fiasco with the recount. I was in my (first) senior year at LSU when this happened. I remember Woody was lambasted and ridiculed DAILY as a pitiful whiner. I didn’t have a really informed opinion at the time other than I wanted him to have won. I never really trusted the vote from New Orleans, for a plethora of reasons, but does anyone have any info on how credible Viguerie’s “considered by many” is?