Living in the dead past and the mandate of heaven.

We hate to acknowlege Democrats when they espouse sound policy positions but the Colonel did not come by his reputation for fairmindedness and integrity entirely by accident. Ok, it was mostly by accident, but be that as it may, we must celebrate the recognition by Sen. Nancy Pelosi that all is not well with the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, which law was enacted to "hold publicly held companies and their executives more accountable."

Normally, there's no upper limit to the ambition of Congresspersons when it comes to grandstanding after some revelation of human cupidity or treachery that occasionally manifests itself in our public life. "Legislation" and grandstanding are, after all, Congress's "product" and the former is invariably served up with the latter to dispel greed from all hearts, deflect the Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune™, banish risk from the face of the earth, and hasten the return -- or arrival -- of the Messiah (depending on your particular take on this issue).

We have already adverted to the wonderful Yiddish proverb, "Send a fool to close a window and she will close all the windows in town." This pretty much summarizes the Aktiongrundregel™ of Congress, sad to say, for its members lust at all times to signal to the voters that they are "doing something." Paradoxically, where screwing with the laws of the Republic is concerned, this is precisely the wrong thing to do, whereas the opposite is true in vile infantry contests where the maxim, dear to infantry leaders everywhere, holds sway, namely, "When in deep [trouble], do something, even if it is the wrong thing."

In the case of Sarbanes-Oxley the original "federal" estimate of the compliance costs was $1.2 billion. The legislative crystal ball was cloudy about then, apparently, because the American Electronic Association recently came up with estimates that the compliance costs of U.S. companies are actually in the neighborhood of $35 billion a year. Actual costs were thus 3,400% higher than estimated. Close enough for government work.

Ms. [Nancy] Pelosi and other Democrats have been quicker to recognize what many traditional champions of free enterprise have been slow to see: the Sarbanes-Oxley's disastrous consequences for our nation's ability to compete.

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Beyond the direct cost of compliance to individual companies, a recent University of Rochester study concluded that the total effect of the law has reduced the stock value of American companies by $1.4 trillion. . . .

The true beneficiaries of Sarbox are the nation's large auditing firms . . . . Surely this law was not intended by its authors to become a full employment act for the same auditing industry which was implicated in the original malfeasance of four or five years ago.

. . . [T]hose in the corporate world who break the law should be punished. They are: Over 700 prosecutions have been launched since 2002 to address corporate crimes. Nevertheless, not one conviction was a result of Sarbox. Meanwhile, Sarbox clearly failed to prevent the massive accounting scandal at Fannie Mae.

So, in short, apart from the cluelessness of Congress about the compliance costs, the indifference of Congress to American industry's international competitiveness, and the fact that Sarbanes-Oxley was not necessary for effective enforcement action, it was really a terrific piece of legislation.

Some fool many decades ago said that the ability of America's rivers to absorb pollution was one of the nation's great natural resources, or words to the effect.

Modern legislators seem to have the same view of other aspects of the American reality:

• the ability of American business to absorb compliance costs without loss of international competitiveness -- infinite;
• the ability of America to shift manufacturing jobs to foreign nations without compromising national security -- infinite;
• the ability of America to absorb masses of illegal immigrants of unknown allegiance, unknown criminal background, and unknown health status without burdening American citizens financially and without compromising national security -- infinite;
• the tolerance of American voters for businesses that thrive by hiring illegal immigrants and that depress American wage levels -- infinite;
• the ability of America to sustain current international trade imbalances -- infinite;
• the willingness of Americans to tolerate Syrian, Iranian, Saudi, and Palestinian insults and sponsorship of state terror -- infinite; and, among others,
• the willingness of Americans to tolerate the corruption of American officials by drug money and the transfer of gigantic amounts of money to foreign drug growers, drug manufacturers, and terrorists -- infinte.

This viewpoint might profitably be termed Politics As Usual™, founded on an antiquated perception of America's immense relative strength and invulnerability. This perception had its roots in the justifiable pride in the miracles of WWII military production and many feats of American arms, ignorance of the huge debt owed to Soviet infantry, and our extraordinary luck at having two oceans on either flank that preserved our industrial base from the wartime destruction suffered by most of the rest of the world.

Current American anxieties stem from the realization that Politics As Usual™ is not quite gettin' 'er done and that the days of bayonets and street fighting have not been banished from our national experience.

The Chinese have historically considered the concept of "The Mandate of Heaven," which became of interest from time to time during periods of dynastic decline. Such periods arrived when the rustle of skirts in the imperial palace became too loud and the manly vigor of the dynasty was supplanted by something akin to finger painting and an elegant aestheticism. Most recently, the Qin Dynasty failed to appreciate and counter the threat posed by foreigners showing up in large ships with disciplined and well armed infantry. The elite of China just couldn't grasp that not only was China no longer the center of the world but that the barbarians from the new center of the world could overcome any and all of the armies that China could put into the field.

In short, the center weakened imperceptibly and the cumulation of unsettling signs of decay and rule by girlie men gradually intruded in the perceptions of the illiterate masses of China. Earthquakes, floods, and flights of animals irrationally began to be seen as the withdrawal of Heaven's mandate, and a new time of chaos and renewal was ushered in.

Bipartisan cluelessness on something as basic as Sarbanes-Oxley suggests that there is a failure of national leadership, evidencing as it does the fervent commitment to Business As Usual™. Furthermore, the hysteria of the Democrat leadership about matters clearly relating to appropriate national self defense on the one hand, and the inability of the Republicans to grasp the lessons taught by Ronald Reagan and to perform basic tasks such as the simple, uncomplicated sealing of the nation's borders, on the other, do not augur well. Other instances of national cluelessness suggest the same lesson. E.g., President Bush's failure to grasp the precise nature of the threat from "Official Islam" (our current favorite term for Islamofascism or Islamism, etc.)

We may fail to appreciate the true resilience of America's politics, and we hope that is the case. One more 9/11-scale event may focus national thinking in a way that numerous smaller events did not. (E.g., the attacks on the USS Cole and the USS Stark, the bombings of our military barracks in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, etc., etc.)

Again, we hope something far short of that will happen to guide elite thinking to a new consensus less founded in illusion.

Personally, we doubt there will be much of a change in the near term and it will be "Steady as she goes" until we do a national imitation of the Exxon Valdez. Things did get cleaned up after a while. But it was expensive and quite avoidable.

"Two Cheers for Nancy Pelosi." By Mallory Factor, Wall Street journal, 3/18/06 (subscription required).