A frequent theme in political rants, both on the libertarian/anarchist right and the socialist/anarchist left, is the notion of the limited liability company. Usually, the concept of limited liability is defined however it best suits the argument, and usually to negative effect. For example, the film The Corporation (2003) was recently screened on SABC 1 in South Africa. As with most bulk-buy trash, it was a late-night broadcast, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open after an hour and a half of distortion, sly inference, slander, oversimplification, quasi-legal mumbo-jumbo, out-of-context quotation, innuendo, and general anti-capitalist drivel. I’m strong, but not strong enough for 145 minutes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein all together.

Still, I got the idea: The Corporation, portrayed with sinister madness through a montage of accidents, disasters, lost legal battles, famous frauds, cuts to Hitler and a clever theme of selected crude advertising footage from the 1950s, is evil and dangerous. Worse, you and I are just wide-eyed ingénues too stupid to defend our virtue. For that, we have heroes like Captain Moore, Gnome Chomsky and the Little Gnome. One of the major themes in the film was this notion of (cue dramatic crescendo)… limited liability. It was vaguely interpreted to imply a corporation and the evil people that comprise it — by which they mean everyone above the LOE (line of evility) that you’ll find on every HR (human resources) org chart at about the level of M/CM (middle and compromised management) — gets to deny liability for their actions. In essence, a limited-liability company charter, granted by the evil corporatist government, is a licence to exploit, harm and kill, and exploiting, harming and killing customers and employees is a great way to make money. Or so the illogic goes.

If this kind of thinking is appealing, because you’re either a right-wing anarchist who thinks governments are evil and therefore legal protections granted in corporate law are probably evil too, or you’re a left-wing socialist who thinks corporations are evil and have corrupted government in order to exploit the poor masses, it may be worth reading an excellent essay by Brad Edmonds, over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in which he discusses what a limited liability company is and is not, who is and isn’t liable, and on what legal, political and philosophical grounds the concept is based.

2007 turned out to be a pretty good year for George W. Bush.

Late last year, voters turfed Republicans out of Congress over either lack of spending restraint or dissatisfaction with progress in Iraq or both, depending who you ask. (Robert Novak: war; Alan Greenspan: spending; Rush Limbaugh: both, and liberals suck; Reason magazine: both, and government sucks.)

This electoral loss, which meant Bush could no longer rely on a compliant Congress to send him only bills he likes, merely reinforced the view that Bush now is a lame duck, unable to govern effectively. (CNN: Is Bush already a lame duck?; Lou Dobbs: Beware the lame duck; The Guardian: ‘Lame duck’ Bush faces struggle to push through new agenda; The Telegraph: Allies desert ‘lame duck president’; Dan Froomkin: How lame a duck?)

A few voices ran against the media herd, but looked like wishful thinkers. (Christian Science Monitor: Bush’s lame-duck advantage.)

But on Friday, Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal, and Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times (apparently independently) noted that Bush hasn’t had a bad 2007 at all. Moore’s item is worth quoting in its entirety:

Bush on the Comeback Trail

Just as Newt Gingrich was the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, so Nancy Pelosi has become a great political asset to George W. Bush. Mr. Bush is on a roll legislatively and even his poll numbers are inching up while Congress’s have sunk into the teens. There’s nothing like having a foil in Congress to rehabilitate a president. Just ask Harry Truman.

This time last year it would have been inconceivable that Mr. Bush would have a successful 2007, or that Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Congress would have fewer than one-in-four voters approving their performance. I’ve made a list of Mr. Bush’s policy victories over the Democrats:

1. S-CHIP — Mr. Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill expanding middle-class health care subsidies and Democrats were unable to override that veto.
2. Alternative Minimum Tax — Democrats passed AMT reform without the offsetting tax hikes they had threatened.
3. Energy bill — What was a monster at the beginning of the year is now just a fairly harmless CAFE standards bill. Environmentalists are fuming.
4. Hate Crimes Legislation — Mr. Bush blocked it. The Congressional Black Caucus is furious.
5. War funding — Mr. Bush prevailed without any pull-out date. At the start of the year this looked impossible.
6. The Budget — Mr. Bush mostly prevailed on domestic spending totals.
7. No new taxes — all of the Democratic tax proposals were killed, including tobacco taxes, hedge fund taxes and energy company taxes.

It pretty much looks like the White House ran the table. Merry Christmas, Madam Speaker.

As I’ve noted before, US economic and foreign policies matter most to me as a foreigner: whether Americans permit gays to be married, guns to be carried or God to be harried doesn’t keep me up at night.

During the 2004 presidential elections, I said to a friend that perhaps the US needs a presidential term under a Democrat, if only to remind the people in general (and Republican voters in particular) that the Democrats aren’t very good at low taxes, low spending, light-touch environmental regulation and effective foreign policy. Either a John Kerry in 2004, or a Hillary Clinton in 2008, would achieve this goal, and as a result, cement the longer-term rise of the GOP. It now appears that Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco leftist in charge of the ineffectual Democratic Congress, may have achievedachieve this in just two years. Especially if the Democrats nominate Clinton (admittedly, Dennis Kucinich would do too), my money’s on a Republican presidential election win just less than a year from now.

Update: Repaired a grammatic blunder in stating Nancy Pelosi’s term: either she “may have achieved it in just one year”, or she “may achieve it in just two years” — my phrasing was inconsistent, and the former may yet be undone by a sparkling Congressional performance in 2008 (when Martians may land and I may win the lottery).