[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 131 (Wednesday, September 16, 2009)]
[House]
[Pages H9646-H9653]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 FREE ENTERPRISE AND THE INVISIBLE HAND

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Foster). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 2009, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, as always, it's an honor to address 
you on the floor of the House of Representatives. Having listened to 
some of the dialogue of my colleagues that have been here just prior 
and hopefully will join me in the next hour, I think it's important 
that the American people return their focus again to the values that 
made this a great Nation.
  We're a country that needs to be cognizant of our history. And that's 
why we teach it in our public and our private and parochial schools. 
It's why we teach it in our families. We pass the lore of the American 
Dream and history of the United States of America on down to our 
children, and we ask our children to pass it to their children, and on 
and on. And to make sure that there is a consistent continuity, we 
teach the history of the United States in the context of the world.
  And so something that seems to be missing from the awareness of the 
people on this side of the aisle that are advocating a national health 
care act, a socialized medicine plan, is the foundation of the 
greatness of America. And I could go off into a lot of different 
tangents about the pillars of American exceptionalism, but central to 
those pillars is the idea of freedom--the freedom and the free markets 
and the freedom of the markets to make a decision on what they want to 
provide to the consumers.
  And so this is Adam Smith. This is Adam Smith that laid this out. 
Even though you can read through all 1,057 pages of The Wealth of 
Nations, you'll not find him use the expression ``the invisible hand.'' 
But it's the invisible hand, indeed, that best describes the vision of 
Adam Smith in 1776, having printed and published his book The Wealth of 
Nations.
  It's the very foundation of free enterprise. And centuries later we 
come up with Keynesian economics. The idea that there is no basis for 
the economy. That the economy is just a great big huge national or 
global chain letter. And that if the government would just print a lot 
of money and spend the money a lot of ways and maybe go drill some 
holes in an abandoned coal mine--this is according to Keynes--and bury 
that money in those holes and then fill the abandoned coal mine up with 
garbage and turn the entrepreneurs loose to go dig up the money, he 
said he could solve all of the unemployment in America.
  I know, it sounds bizarre, Mr. Speaker. I am not making this up. This 
is the characterization of John Maynard Keynes and the difference 
between the Keynesian approach, President Obama's approach to 
economics, and this approach from the free market side of this, where 
the consumer makes the demand by pulling with its invisible hand the 
loaf of bread off the shelf.
  Let's just say there's a good loaf of bread for a buck. And the 
invisible hand will pull that good loaf of bread for $1 off that shelf 
over and over again and the shelves will be bare. And somebody else 
comes in and they say, Here's a loaf of bread that's not quite as good 
for a buck and a quarter.
  Well, they might just pass up that purchase, even though they need 
the bread, and wait until the fresh ones come from the bakery that 
provides the good bread for a dollar. And so the bakery that provides 
the good bread for a dollar is filling the shelves up with their 
product and selling a lot of volume. And the bakery that sells the not 
quite so good bread for a buck and a quarter doesn't sell very much 
bread, if at all. And, over time, the company that's being out-competed 
with the higher-priced, lower-quality bread either learns how to make 
good bread for a competitive price or they give up the market to the 
company that makes the good bread for the competitive price. And it 
isn't the end of the world if we end up with one company producing 
bread in that fashion.
  What if we get down to where only one company is baking bread, and 
it's for a dollar and it's a good price and it's high quality and it's 
a value to the consumer. Not so bad. But if that company realizes that 
they are running a monopoly and they decide to jack the price of their 
good loaf of bread up to a buck and quarter, buck and a half, $1.75, 
maybe lower the quality, pull a little wheat out, put a little 
something else back in there, then what happens? The consumer gets 
dissatisfied. And the dissatisfied consumer then either bakes their 
bread at home to get the quality and the cost that they want, or they 
open up their own little bakery.
  Maybe they bake that bread at home and they decide, I'm going to 
provide a little bit for my family. Then it's so popular that you 
provide a little for your neighbors. And then the family and the 
neighbors decide, I want mom to keep baking bread. So they want to pay 
her so she keeps baking that bread.
  Now, high-quality bread that was now a buck and a half because you 
had a monopoly. The price of that is competitive because the homegrown 
business begins to compete into that volume and quantity and the cost 
of the marketplace and pull the cost back down.
  That's the difference between the free enterprise system and central 
command, central planning, the 5-year planning, the Federal Government 
deciding what's going to be made and what the price will be. And if it 
doesn't work, you subsidize the people making. And if that doesn't 
work, you subsidize the people buying it. Sound like the car industry? 
Yes, it is, Mr. Speaker.
  This is the difference between the philosophy on this side of the 
aisle. They think that they are smart enough to make all of these calls 
for all of the consumers, except for perhaps the butcher, the baker and 
the candlestick maker.
  Mr. AKIN. Wait a minute. Would the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. A moment here before I yield. On this side of the 
aisle are the people that believe in free enterprise, the invisible 
hand, Adam Smith's vision, Adam Smith's dream, and the idea that you 
cannot manage an economy. You have got to let the supply and demand 
manage the economy. That's the difference. We believe in free 
enterprise. You folks do not. And if you disagree, I will certainly 
yield to you, but not one of you is going to stand and take this 
argument on.
  I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. I can't help but jump in when somebody is defending the 
cause of free enterprise. I guess there's different ways to describe or 
explain the phenomena that you're talking about. And one of them is 
that one side of the aisle tends to be much more in favor of free 
enterprise and the other one is much more in favor of having the 
government do things.

                              {time}  2015

  I guess what we start to get to is a question that's kind of a 
fundamental question, really the biggest thing that we divide and talk 
about and argue and debate about on this floor is, what is the proper 
function of the civil government, particularly the Federal Government? 
What should the Federal Government be doing? Should it be baking bread 
or should it not be baking bread? Should baking bread be left to 
citizens out on the street? Should it be the job of the Federal 
Government to be giving food away to people? Should it be the job of 
the Federal Government, according to Joe the Plumber, to take money 
from one person and give it to another person? Is the job of the 
Federal Government to be the big sugar daddy, dispensing favors? Is it 
the job of the Federal Government basically to be Big Mama, taking care 
of everybody? Or is there a different purpose for government, which is 
simply justice, simply creating a level playing field so that everybody 
can go out and use their God-given potential as they're directed to do 
it? And it seems to me, gentleman, that you can make the case of 
Federal control of everything versus free enterprise, or you could just 
say,

[[Page H9647]]

What's really the legitimate job of the Federal Government?
  Now we had some liberals in this Chamber some years ago, and they 
discovered there were people in America who were hungry. Of course 
there have been people in America who have been hungry for a long time. 
But they came up with a bright idea that we're going to socialize a 
little bit, we're going to steal money from some other people through 
taxes, print food stamps, and give food stamps to people who are hungry 
to take care of the problem of hunger. In fact, they declared war on 
hunger, and hunger won, of course. That was their approach.
  What's being proposed here today, gentleman, is an entirely more 
radical agenda. This would be the equivalent of somebody discovering 
that there is hunger in America and the government taking over the 
farms, the grocery stores and the distribution houses in between, 
taking over the entire food industry. That's what's being proposed with 
this socialized medicine. It's not a matter of just giving somebody 
Medicare or Medicaid who can't afford to pay for medical care. It's 
about the government taking over one-fifth of the economy. This is a 
whole radical step more in the direction of a challenge to freedom and 
free enterprise. It is fundamentally un-American is what we're dealing 
with.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, the statement that was made on 
the floor of the House the night before last by the gentlelady from 
Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, the analysis of a lead economist in the 
country that had done the analysis, what is the percentage of the 
private sector profits that now have been nationalized by the Federal 
Government? If you add that up, if you add up the three large 
investment banks that have been nationalized, if you add up Fannie Mae 
and Freddie Mac, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler, look at the profits 
that come from that, roll that up, and compare that to the net profits 
of the private sector overall, this Federal Government--most of it 
under the administration of President Obama--has nationalized 30 
percent of the private sector profits in the United States.
  Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, just a minute. I can't help but interrupt. 
Thirty percent has been nationalized if you just add up those big 
corporations?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Thirty percent of the private sector profits have 
been nationalized, most of it by this administration, of those 
corporations that I have mentioned, those eight entities.
  Mr. AKIN. Thirty percent of the profits. And that's not even counting 
health care yet.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. When you add health care to it, that's 17\1/2\ 
percent of our overall economy, round it up to 18 because I can do the 
math--30 plus 18 is 48 percent. If they succeed in passing socialized 
medicine, 48 percent of the private sector profits in the United States 
will have been nationalized, most of it by this administration. This 
free country, this country that has built upon free enterprise, in 
part--and one of the pillars of American exceptionalism is free 
enterprise--will have had almost half of it swallowed up by an 
aggressive appetite of the White House without justification but only 
because we are in a time of an economic crisis. Magically, the 
solutions that have been advocated by the President and the hard-core, 
left-wing, jump-off-the-cliff liberals in this Congress and across the 
country, those solutions that they've been advocating for 20 years 
magically become the solution for the economic crisis that we have been 
in over the last year.
  Mr. AKIN. If you would yield, gentleman, one of the things somebody 
once said--and I was not a whiz on taking history in high school--but 
if you don't learn from history, you are bound to repeat mistakes. And 
I do recall a very threatening and ominous nation that we saw taking 
over country after country called the Soviet Union. If you were to try 
to just simplify their philosophy, it was that government was going to 
take care of food, clothing and shelter. They were going to pay for 
your education, set you up with a job, and take care of your health 
care. We laughed when that country collapsed, a little bit with a sense 
of anxiety because they had nuclear weapons aimed at us and all. We 
said, you know that Communist/Socialist stuff won't work. Their economy 
was a mess. They couldn't keep up with us in the arms race because 
their economy was a disaster. The government can't run all that stuff 
efficiently. People starved to death over there. Their medical care was 
so abysmal, people that went into their hospitals would shudder. There 
was no anaesthetic, no clean bandages. It was a disaster.
  And when the whole thing went down the drain, we said, Everybody 
knows Communism/Socialism won't work. So what are we proposing now? The 
government's going to provide food. The government's going to provide 
housing. The government's going to provide your education. We just 
decided to nationalize a whole lot more of that. No more private loans. 
We're going to have the government take care of all that. And now we're 
talking about the government--not only the insurance and the 
automotive, but now the government wants to take over one-fifth of the 
economy in terms of health care.
  Now, it seems to me we should learn something from history, don't you 
think, gentleman?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, in reclaiming from the gentleman from 
Missouri, I will go further, Mr. Speaker; and that is, I recall those 
years when they had collective farming in the Soviet Union. They had a 
5-year plan for the production of the entire nation. They would sit 
down and decide, Okay, here's what we're going to do. We are going to 
set up our factories and hire our workers and provide--to the extent 
that they can manage it--the raw materials necessary to run all that 
out. And here's where we're going to go in 5 years, doing that with 
farming, for example.
  Can you imagine, we have farmers that are making crop decisions right 
up to the moment that they plant, and then they are cutting-edge on 
fertilizer and herbicide, et cetera, and equipment to get efficiency 
out of a GPS control of our equipment so that they can apply fertilizer 
according to the soil types and yields that they get back out of it. 
All of these things are going on in realtime.
  Mr. AKIN. I can tell the gentleman is from Iowa. He has got this 
farming technology down. Isn't that incredible, GPS in your tractor, 
telling you how much fertilizer to put in a section of a field? It's 
amazing what free enterprise can do.

  Mr. KING of Iowa. I actually have seen the corn planter parked--not 
in Iowa, but the State south of me--when people went fishing, but it's 
pretty rare. So what we saw instead in the Soviet Union was that farm 
workers, when it was time to harvest the crop, their 8-hour shift would 
end. They would park the tractor, park the combine, and a crop could 
rot in the field or be hailed out or rained out or frozen out. Because 
they were hourly employees, they didn't have an interest in the actual 
product result. They just had an interest in--remember, the old saying 
was that the workers in the Soviet Union will pretend to work, and the 
Soviet Union will pretend to pay the workers. That's what happened, 
that's where they went, and it is a big difference.
  By the way, this would be the 16th of September. We're 3 days away 
from the 1-year anniversary of the first time that I had heard Members 
of Congress say to me in the years I've been here, See, this proves 
capitalism doesn't work. They said that on the day that Henry Paulson 
came to this Capitol and demanded $700 billion to try to stop what he 
predicted was a free-fall in the financial industry; and they said, 
Well, see, free enterprise is the cause of this, it's the problem, it 
doesn't work, and it's proven. They said so September 19, almost a year 
ago today.
  Mr. AKIN. You know, the thing that just amazed me about that comment, 
Free enterprise doesn't work because we've got this big economic 
crisis. And you go, Well, let's see. What's the economic crisis caused 
by?
  Oh, it's a real estate problem. Oh, real estate. In what regard? 
Well, it seems like a whole lot of people have mortgages that they 
can't pay in real estate. Well, how did that happen? Oh, well, we've 
got Freddie and Fannie. And what sort of agencies are those? Quasi-
governmental agencies. And what have they been doing? They've been 
instructed by the U.S. Congress to make loans to people who can't 
afford to pay their loans.
  Now guess what's happening, the people can't afford to pay their 
loans, and

[[Page H9648]]

all this stuff is sliding down the wall in a big mess. So we've sold 
this stuff all over the world, and now the economy is in a mess. Let's 
see, how did this economy get in a mess? Oh, the Congress created an 
agency who distributed lots and lots of loot to Congressmen in the form 
of PAC checks. They created an agency to sell stocks and bonds, 
packaged up in a nice clever way by Wall Street that weren't worth 
anything because the people couldn't pay their mortgages, and we say 
this is a failure of free enterprise? It's a failure of socialized 
government trying to impose itself on the free market and in the idea 
of trying to be charitable, saddling somebody with a loan they can't 
afford to pay so they have got to go into bankruptcy. What a 
compassionate solution.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. The gentleman from Missouri is referring to, I 
believe, the Community Reinvestment Act that passed this Congress in 
1978, signed into law by Jimmy Carter. It was brought about because of 
the allegation--and there's a basis of it in truth--that there were 
large lending agencies that were doing home mortgages in particular but 
writing real estate mortgages that drew red lines around districts, 
usually in inner cities, because the real estate values were declining 
because of crime and other activities in those areas. The real estate 
wasn't being kept up, so nobody wanted to buy real estate in those 
neighborhoods. They drew a red line around them and said, We're not 
going to loan money into these neighborhoods.
  They passed the Community Reinvestment Act as a means to try to 
address that, and that planted the seed. Even though the motive was 
probably pretty good, that planted the seed for organizations like 
ACORN to come in and seek to intimidate, let me say, intimidate them 
into making bad loans in bad neighborhoods to people that didn't have 
the means to pay the loan.
  Mr. AKIN. Gentleman, you just jumped out of the realm of free 
enterprise, didn't you? You jumped into the realm of government 
planning.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. You jumped into government-managed regulations of 
lending institutions that were trying to comply with the letter and 
intent of the law.
  Mr. AKIN. So there's no failure of free enterprise at all. It wasn't 
a failure of free enterprise, was it?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It was not a failure of free enterprise.
  Mr. AKIN. It was a failure of another government socialized scheme is 
what it was.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I think I can't embellish that a lot more and be 
more accurate than the statement the gentleman has made.
  Mr. AKIN. What I was getting at even more so was Freddie and Fannie, 
because you had the Reinvestment Act. But parallel to it was Freddie 
and Fannie. And Freddie and Fannie were encouraged to make all of these 
loans to people who couldn't pay. But then the bankers got smart, and 
they cut the loans up in lots of little pieces and packaged them up and 
sold them all over the place. The thing that is interesting was, people 
were really getting down on Bush for making such a bad economy and it 
was free enterprise's fault, it was George Bush's fault.
  In reality, you go in The New York Times and you see President Bush 
in 2003--I remember because it was September 11, 2003, New York Times, 
not exactly a conservative document. And this is Bush saying, Hey, I've 
got to have more authority to control Freddie and Fannie. They're out 
of control. They're making loans that are going to become a huge 
disaster.
  And at the same time you have a quote in that article of Barney Frank 
from the floor of this House, who is now the chairman of the committee 
that runs all of that saying, Freddie and Fannie are fine. You can read 
the quote.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Would the gentleman repeat that date again?
  Mr. AKIN. It was September 11, 2003, New York Times.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Why does the gentleman remember that?
  Mr. AKIN. Of course, obviously, September 11, 2001.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. So 2 years from the date you had the now chairman 
of the Financial Services Committee coming to the floor, resisting 
regulation and increased capitalization on Fannie and Freddie--they're 
a government-sponsored enterprise that had the implicit guarantee of 
the full faith and credit of the Federal Government behind them in 
2003, September 11.
  Now there is another date that sticks in my mind. Two years and a 
little more than a month later, October 26, 2005, an amendment was 
brought to the floor of the House of Representatives that would require 
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac to be capitalized, comparable to that of other 
lending and competing institutions and to require them to be regulated 
in a similar fashion. That amendment was vigorously resisted by the now 
chairman of the Financial Services Committee, Barney Frank, and yet 
Barney Frank came to the well on the Thursday before we broke for the 
Easter vacation this year and set up a 60-minute period of time to 
explain to Americans in that little lull--everybody else was going home 
but me and a couple others--that none of that was his fault. That it 
went outside of him, that the regulations were not necessary, the 
capitalization was not necessary.
  Well, we know the answer. The implicit guarantee--and by the way, the 
gentleman from Massachusetts said on the floor of the House of 
Representatives on that day of October 26, If anybody thinks I'm going 
to vote to support a capitalized guarantee of Fannie Mae and Freddie 
Mac, they're wrong. I won't do that.
  Mr. AKIN. They learned from his mistake.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. We ended up with a nationalization.
  I yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. AKIN. The interesting thing was, he was not in the majority party 
at the time. I think he opposed legislation, but we passed it here in 
the House. Republicans were in charge at that time. We passed 
legislation in the House to regulate and to require that capitalization 
of Freddie and Fannie. It went to the Senate. But because of Senate 
rules, Democrats in the Senate were able to kill that legislation. And 
yet they want to blame President Bush, they want to blame free 
enterprise for what was another one of these socialized schemes where 
the big government is going to step in and try and repeal the laws of 
economics.

                              {time}  2030

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming briefly from the gentlemen, I would 
point out that October 26, 2005, went the other way. The gentleman from 
Massachusetts, now the chairman of the Financial Services Committee, 
succeeded in convincing this body that Fannie and Freddie didn't need 
to be capitalized and regulated. And that amendment failed here on the 
floor of the House of Representatives in 2005, and it has gone in that 
direction since more support for Fannie and Freddie, who spent tens of 
thousands--in fact hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying this 
Congress so that they would be exempt from the standards that were 
required of other lending institutions.
  And that is part of this package, the Community Reinvestment Act, 
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ACORN asserting themselves as a broker in 
the middle of this and brokering bad loans in bad neighborhoods, 
intimidating bankers to give those loans, and then passing those along 
in the secondary market to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and getting 
blocks of loans from the lending institutions for them to underwrite 
themselves and give the authority on loans that would be approved.
  Mr. AKIN. And of course we are going to use Federal money to pay 
ACORN to do all of these activities, which has become an interesting 
topic lately, as well, as we've seen some enterprising young people 
going in and checking out exactly what the story was in these different 
ACORN locations.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. And as you mentioned an ACORN location, the 
gentleman from Missouri, I happen to have an ACORN location here. This 
little picture is taken not off the Internet, not by somebody that 
slipped in surreptitiously. This is a picture I personally took the 
weekend before the 4th of July, I'm going to guess the 2nd or so of 
July, 2009.
  I went down to ACORN headquarters, Mr. Speaker. This is at 2609 Canal 
Street, New Orleans, and this building is ACORN's national 
headquarters--for all I know, the international headquarters of ACORN. 
It is the most fortified building in the neighborhood.

[[Page H9649]]

The door, itself, is mostly bars and so is the ground floor, the second 
floor. And you can see through these bars it's a four- or five-story 
building. And if you look, Mr. Speaker, you can see this huge Obama 
picture right inside the window at the national headquarters of ACORN.
  Mr. AKIN. Now, that's getting millions of dollars of Federal money. 
So we're using taxpayer money--
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Fifty-three million at least, and I think 
significantly more, actually.
  Mr. AKIN. Fifty-three million of taxpayer dollars to advertise for a 
political candidate.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Well, I don't know that it all goes for 
advertisement, but the law says not one dollar can go for 
advertisement, that they cannot be involved in partisan political 
activity.
  Now, I am an objective observer here. I know a little bit about 
partisan activity. When you put a poster in your office window--in my 
construction office, for example, if I put a poster in my office that 
says Bush for President in 2004, if I were a 501(c)(3) corporation, I 
would be in direct violation of the not-for-profit, nonpartisan 
requirements of the IRS. I would be in violation of the tax laws. If I 
put a poster in my window, I am also in violation of some of my 
customers that are of a different political persuasion. So I'm a little 
sensitive to this, although I've been fairly bold. I follow the law. 
This cannot be following the law.
  ACORN should have its not-for-profit status removed immediately for 
them and every one of their affiliates. They should be taxed. The IRS 
should go in and audit every dollar that's coming in to ACORN and their 
affiliates. There should be a Justice Department investigation. There 
should be a congressional series of investigations done by a number of 
committees, including the committee chaired by the gentleman from 
Massachusetts (Mr. Frank). Financial services should investigate. 
Judiciary should investigate. Government Reform should investigate. 
Ways and Means should investigate. If I could find a way to get the Ag 
Committee investigating, that's what we need to do with ACORN.
  Mr. AKIN. Well, it almost makes you wonder about the Attorney General 
investigating. I suppose, perhaps, the gentleman has seen some of the 
various tapes that were cut with hidden cameras as people went into 
various ACORN locations.
  It was kind of an interesting phenomenon, nothing that was broken by 
the big media in America, but it just shows that that underground kind 
of media, the new Web and the Internet and the bloggers and all--you 
have an enterprising gentleman and a young lady going in and being very 
bold at various ACORN offices talking about the fact that they want to 
open a house of ill repute and want to get some help from ACORN to help 
them figure out how to buy the house. And they are so candid with what 
they're saying. And the comments that were recorded in camera I think 
have been getting a lot of hits, a lot of people watching it. The 
mainstream media has paid no attention to it, and yet all over America 
people are looking at this. They have already heard about ACORN and the 
dozens of violations of this organization that we're paying for with 
tax dollars. I mean, what in the world is going on?
  You've got--these two are just actors, you know, but they're 
entrepreneurs in an information kind of age. They're just going in 
pretending like they want to open up a house of ill repute so he can 
raise money to run for Congress. It's almost laughable if it weren't 
true.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. As a Republican? Run for Congress as a Republican?
  Mr. AKIN. I didn't hear that word somehow or other.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I didn't either. I heard run for Congress as a 
Democrat. That must have been the measure of plausibility that they had 
to inject to get ACORN to bite on the rest of the bait would be my 
speculation.
  Mr. AKIN. But they were some interesting sets of tapes, and some 
courageous people that were willing to do that because there is some 
threat potential there.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. It is, for me--and reclaiming from the gentleman 
from Missouri, it is astonishing to get a look inside the offices of 
ACORN in four cities in America. And I ask the question, is this the 
culture of ACORN? And I don't know how you argue that it's not. But 
each of them were so willing and so eager to be complicit in helping to 
set up a house of ill repute, as the gentleman from Missouri said. I 
have different names for it. A brothel would be another one. For them 
to go in and pick out this outrageous--I think it was really a far-
reaching scenario. I'm the pimp and this is the prostitute and we want 
to set up this house of ill repute and bring in 13- or 14-year-old 
girls from El Salvador so that they can turn tricks and we can take the 
profits and use some of the profits to put into the political campaign 
so that the pimp can run for Congress? I mean, I don't know. I would 
have a hard time holding myself in if somebody came into my office and 
said such a thing.
  But in each of those cases that have been published--in Baltimore, in 
Washington, D.C., in Brooklyn, in San Bernardino--in each of those 
cases, Mr. Speaker, ACORN reacted as if that was the business that they 
were set up to be in. We will help you facilitate a loan for the house 
of ill repute and we can get you good terms. And furthermore, don't 
report more than about three of those illegal girls that are illegally 
here, and that are most likely illegally here and in the business of 
child prostitution, a slave sex ring before their very eyes. They also 
advocated that they could provide the childcare tax credit and qualify 
for that, that's $1,000 per child per year, and the earned income tax 
credit as well.

  So the numbers work out to about this: ACORN being complicit in 
drawing down, fraudulently, Federal dollars while helping to facilitate 
evasion of income taxes and child prostitution. But the Federal 
taxpayers, if they're successful in what they proposed at least in 
Baltimore, then the child care tax credit and the earned income tax 
credit would add up to, for a family of--let me say a family of five, 
if the prostitute is the mom and the pimp is the dad and three of the 
underage 13- or 14-year-old girls were qualified under the child tax 
credit, that would be about $6,000 from the taxpayers that goes in to 
subsidize the house of prostitution. And this doesn't cause anybody to 
bat an eye at ACORN in four cities in America. That's the culture of 
ACORN. That's this right here.
  Mr. AKIN. I have to interrupt just a minute, if the gentleman would 
yield some time.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I would yield.
  Mr. AKIN. I have always had a deep respect for my congressional 
friend from Iowa and the fact that you're a small business man, but the 
way you put that together, I mean, I can see why you're a good 
businessman. But in your construction business, you tried to stay kind 
of a little closer within the law, and yet here we're talking about an 
organization that's paid for with Federal money.
  Now, what's happened with ACORN, though, is that there have been so 
many of these kinds of things that all of these community organizations 
that used to be under ACORN have changed their names--and it doesn't 
mean they've changed their stripes, but they've changed their names so 
that when we try to withhold funding from ACORN, all the other 
community organizers which used to be ACORN, no longer called ACORN, 
they are still wanting to pull down Federal money to do this wonderful 
entrepreneurial kind of proposal that you're talking about or many 
other kinds of schemes along the same lines.
  And again, I think it suggests it's just one more nail in the coffin 
that says maybe the Federal Government shouldn't be doing this stuff. 
Maybe we've gotten our Federal Government just trying to do too many 
things for too many people. Maybe we better pull back to the idea, as 
you started, gentleman, with the concept of free enterprise, with the 
concept of the Federal Government creating a set of laws where 
everybody is equal before the law, not a setup of special deals, and a 
place where every American can have the freedom and the risk to chase 
the dream that God puts in their own heart, to be whatever it is, 
whether it's a contractor with heavy equipment, as you were, or in the 
steel business, or working in the computer business with IBM, as I was, 
that you can chase the dream that's in your own heart without the 
government doing any special

[[Page H9650]]

deals, either taking your money or giving you any money.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming from the gentleman from Missouri, I so 
appreciate the analysis and the way that you've delivered this. I think 
that this goes deep. And I think because I've had to live, and I know 
the gentleman from Missouri has had to live, and been fortunate to live 
with the underpinnings of what has been the greatness of America, these 
checks and balances that come in not just between the three branches of 
government, the checks and balances that come in between our moral 
values, our values of faith, the laws that we have passed that reflect 
the moral values of our faith and the reverence for the rule of law, 
the letter and the intent of the law that is so necessary if we're 
going to have a civil society.
  And then we've watched, if we go back to Lyndon Baines Johnson and 
the Great Society, they made a decision that they were going to take 
from one economic sector and they were going to pass it along to 
another. I remember seeing a film of hungry children in Appalachia--I 
don't know that they were actually hungry, but they needed some dental 
work. That's what I remember was in the pictures. They weren't dressed 
all that well. Some were barefoot. Some didn't have a shirt on. It was 
summertime in Appalachia. But they kept running these images over and 
over again. And we passed the Great Society right into the middle of 
the Vietnam war and we set up a dependency class of people, this 
dependency class of people that rewarded mothers that had children that 
didn't have fathers in the home.
  And if you will pay mothers to have babies if they don't have fathers 
in the home, women will have babies to become mothers without fathers 
in the home. And if you punish them if there's a father in the home, 
the father won't be around anymore. He might stop by and visit, but 
he's not going to be a resident, not one that can be caught there 
because it will cut the government welfare check. And slowly over time, 
we created a dependency class of people that was dependent upon the 
Federal welfare check to come in.
  And now I look at the inner cities in the United States of America 
and I ask the question, when I see the film within the offices of ACORN 
and I think, what wealth is created in these cities? What is coming out 
of the inner city that is rooted in new wealth? I know what it is that 
comes out of the land. All new wealth comes from the land. You can mine 
it out of the earth in gold or platinum or gravel or limestone, or you 
can raise it out of the soil in corn or beans or--I'll say rice or 
rutabagas. You can actually sing some fish out of the sea. You can cut 
some timber. But all of those resources that I've talked about become 
the foundation of new wealth, that wealth that's necessary if you're 
going to provide the essentials of life that we've long called food, 
clothing and shelter.
  Food, clothing and shelter comes out of the soil. And we do that as 
productively as we can and we value add to that as many times as we 
can, and that's the wealth that pays for--the adage is the butcher, the 
baker, and the candlestick maker. It pays for the accountant, the 
doctor, the lawyer, the school teacher, the pastor. Everything that 
grows out of this economy in a legitimate productive sector can be 
traced back to our land, our earth, our soil.
  But in the inner city, their new wealth doesn't come out of the soil. 
Their new wealth comes from the taxpayers of the United States of 
America, and it's brokered by ACORN. And the benefits are distributed 
back out through the city, and some of it goes into prostitution, some 
goes into illegal drugs.
  The culture that you saw in ACORN is a culture that promotes and 
supports, as a matter of fact, illegal behavior, including 
prostitution, child pornography, and helping to enable bringing in 
illegals into the United States to commit illegal acts. And no one 
batted an eye.
  So the astonishing thing to me----
  Mr. AKIN. If you would yield.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I will yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. AKIN. It seems like what we're really talking about is kind of 
two visions of government. One vision of government is that government 
is limited and government is interested in justice, and it's a vision 
that promotes freedom. It promotes people having the freedom to go out 
and succeed or fail. It allows the individual to take the greatest 
gamble of their life, to live whatever dream God put in their heart. 
And America is full of people that came here and they were nuts, they 
had these crazy dreams, and they worked on them and they worked on 
them, and those dreams became a vague possibility and then they became 
a possibility. And finally those dreams became a reality, and America 
was built one dream at a time.
  There was some nutty guy that had the idea of making a light bulb. He 
made 100 light bulbs and none of them worked, and he said that's good 
because now I know 100 ways not to make a light bulb. His name was 
Thomas Edison.

                              {time}  2045

  It became so common, we called it the American Dream.
  The other view of government is not a rule of law. It's not people 
equal before the law. It's the special deal society. It's the special 
deal for me or for you. If you've got the right government contract, 
you can get a bailout; but if you don't, you go bankrupt. It's a 
special deal that, for one person, you get treated one way, but for 
somebody else, the law is different.
  So the question is: Do we have a rule of law, or do we have basically 
a political kind of controlled anarchy? That's the question. Where are 
we going as a country? Are we going to have a rule of law? Are we going 
to have people equal before the law, or is the government going to be 
the big sugar daddy that's supposed to take care of everybody and that 
will reward people for behaviors which will destroy their lives? Is 
that the sort of government that we want?
  That's the question before the American public today as they watch 
what happens on the floor of this Congress.
  I yield back.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman.
  I would point out my view on this that you'll never get the people on 
the other side into that particular debate. They don't want to go down 
that path because, first of all, they don't like the result that one 
logically gets. The other component of it is that I think they actually 
hide their own eyes from the result of what they're seeking to do. I 
think that their endeavors are incremental endeavors to expand the 
power base and to expand the political base, which is the power base, 
and I don't think they've gamed this thing out to what America will 
look like if they succeed in these endeavors--if they expand ACORN, if 
they succeed in writing into law cap-and-trade, if they succeed in 
writing into law a socialized medicine plan or if they succeed in 
writing into law a comprehensive amnesty for illegals.
  In the end, what does America look like? They can't bear the thought 
of having to admit the logical conclusion of the policies that they 
propose, but they're certainly for the things that give them a short-
term power base.
  I put the poster of ACORN up here because, I think, they are the 
largest cancer America has ever seen. They're in over 100 cities in the 
United States. They have divisions within the cities. They've drawn 
down over $53 million. They qualify into pots of money of up to $8.5 
billion. They won't draw it all, but they do. It's the pressure that 
has come from the houses of prostitution that they're seeking to help 
fund, from the criticism that has come from the Community Reinvestment 
Act, from shaking down lenders, from over 400,000 fraudulent voter 
registration forms, from the prosecutions and convictions of ACORN 
people--up to 70 in the United States, another 11 indictments in the 
State of Florida with six of them arrested and five they're on the hunt 
for, and convictions of, or I'll say at least indictments of ACORN as a 
corporation in Nevada, from their policies of directly violating the 
election laws, and from setting up quotas for people who are 
registering people rather than hiring them by the hour or by salary.
  Now, here is the latest news flash. First, before I do the news 
flash, I have to tell you, Mr. Speaker, that there has been some 
backing off from ACORN, and it's the vote that took place on the floor 
of the United States Senate. There were seven U.S. Senators who

[[Page H9651]]

voted to defend ACORN. Two of them are from Illinois, by the way--the 
President's home State, Rahm Emanuel's home State and David Axelrod's 
home State. Those two Senators continue to defend ACORN. It is Rod 
Blagojevich's home State, I might add, and he has also been a 
beneficiary of ACORN's work. They defended ACORN. The other Senators 
voted not to fund ACORN through ACORN housing.
  Then we know about fraudulent votes and about a whole list of things 
that are going on. We also know that the U.S. Census Bureau finally 
announced a couple, 3 days ago that they were not going to continue 
with their relationship with ACORN and that they'd already signed off a 
month or two ago. I don't believe them yet.
  This is a news flash that came while the gentleman from Missouri was 
speaking, and this is an article that tells about it. It says: Days 
after the Census Bureau announced it would cut ties with the organizing 
group ACORN and barely 24 hours after the Senate voted to withdraw 
funding from the lightning rod activist group, the White House, which 
is speaking for the President of the United States, expressed support 
for measures to hold the group accountable for unacceptable behavior.
  Mr. Speaker, listen to this. This is a Jeremiah Wright moment. White 
House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs alluded to video taken by the 
conservative site biggovernment.com showing ACORN employees giving 
advice to individuals posing as sex traffickers. We've just talked 
about this.
  The quote from Robert Gibbs: Obviously, the conduct that you see on 
those tapes is completely unacceptable. I think everyone would agree to 
that. Gibbs said, The administration takes accountability extremely 
seriously.
  That's good because I will tell you I want to make sure that is the 
case with the President.
  Then it goes on and says, Characterizing the Census Bureau's decision 
as a move based on a lack of confidence in ACORN's ability to perform 
its expected duties, Gibbs said he was not sure whether the President 
would ask Democrats to pull back from any campaign year collaboration 
with the group.
  A quote from Gibbs: I don't know that I've had any discussion with 
him about that, Gibbs said.
  So, Mr. Speaker, what we have here are a few more platitudes, a 
little more word processing that's going on here that would indicate 
that the President is a little concerned and that maybe Robert Gibbs is 
concerned about some fraud and corruption and blatant violation of a 
whole series of laws that seem to be apparent if you watch the film of 
ACORN, but we have yet to hear the President do, let me say, a mea 
culpa. I have not heard the President say, Even though I played for 
ACORN as a young man, even though I coached ACORN employees, even 
though I headed up Project Vote, which is indistinguishable from ACORN, 
even though I'm part and parcel of ACORN--and where is the ACORN logo 
on his shirt? Oh, by the way, I happen to have a little visual of this, 
Mr. Speaker.
  Even though this is all the case and it's a fact, we still don't have 
the President saying, Well, let's do what we did with Jeremiah Wright. 
Let's get ACORN out of our lives. Let's go investigate them with the 
FBI, with the Department of Justice and with every possible committee 
in the United States Congress, giving them a complete forensic analysis 
and coming back for every dollar that flowed through ACORN and all of 
their affiliates to the extent where we can purge the poison from that 
corrupt enterprise, ACORN.
  That needs to happen, Mr. Speaker. It needs to be directed by the 
President, or this ACORN albatross hangs around his neck until he does.
  Mr. AKIN. If the gentleman would yield, my memory may be a little 
weak on this, but we were involved about a year ago with this big Wall 
Street bailout. My understanding was, of part of that Wall Street 
bailout money, there was some sort of a tax that was going to be placed 
on some of those companies that was going to go directly to fund ACORN.

  Do you know if that part of the bill passed on part of that Wall 
Street bailout? Do you know whether the funding for ACORN was built in 
there? I remember there was talk that it would be. If that's the case, 
my concern is this: that all of these organizations known as ACORN are 
not stupid. They're changing their names to community organizers so 
that you'll have all of these people who used to be ACORN still sitting 
there, still collecting Federal money and yet will no longer have the 
ACORN name because the ACORN name has been so incredibly disgraced.
  So I guess my question and concern is--and I think as you're saying--
if we're really serious about dealing with this corruption, then it 
seems like we're going to have to deal with more than ACORN. We're 
going to have to deal with all of those organizations which came under 
that ACORN umbrella.
  I would yield.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. In reclaiming my time from the gentleman, I have to 
agree. I don't know that that money is in that fund, but if one were 
going to do a search, I'd look for the number $1.6 million. That seems 
to be the number that I recall. I'm not sure which bill that was in, 
but that sticks in my mind. I remember numbers better than I do names.
  Thanks to Congressman Darrell Issa from California, who is a ranking 
member of an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, they 
produced a nonpartisan report that came to a whole series of 
conclusions about ACORN. In that report, they list 361 ACORN 
affiliates. Now, I don't know that all of those are live, active ACORN 
affiliates. I suspect some of them are defunct at this point. The 
pattern looks like whenever ACORN had a new project, they created 
another corporation, but many of them--I can't say all of them--a 
majority of those corporations are housed and reside in this place on 
Canal Street in New Orleans.
  Now, can you imagine as many as--and probably not quite that many--
but as many as 361 different corporations and affiliates inside these 
doors? This is a four- or a five-story building. It's not that big. In 
there, the finances that come are commingled through one single 
corporation that handles all of this. Now, money is fungible, and if 
there's a single Federal dollar that goes into any of these and it goes 
into a centralized account and gets redistributed out of that central 
pot, you can't sort that. There are not firewalls in that. It is a fact 
that there are not firewalls in that, which means that any of the money 
that's used in any of the 361 corporations is used for political 
purposes, and it's a violation of Federal law.
  This, itself, is a violation of Federal law, Mr. Speaker--``Obama 
'08'' right in the window of a 501(c)(3). There it is blatantly for all 
to see.
  We do need to do a complete investigation. We need the President of 
the United States to come forward and to come clean. This is what the 
President has been. He is the consummate community organizer. He has 
risen to the top of his profession. He has done it through the path of 
ACORN, through the path of Project Vote and through a series of other 
organizations, all of them affiliated within. This isn't a man who has 
come up through the free enterprise system, who has signed the front of 
the paycheck. He has signed only the back and has worked within these 
community organizers who are sitting there; and Chicago politics, 
Chicago politics that are steeped in the Rod Blagojevich and steeped in 
the Rahm Emanuel and in the hardball politics where he would tell the 
supporters during the campaign, Get in their faces.
  He stood here at the rostrum in the House of Representatives and 
said, ``We will call you out,'' because he disagreed with what turns 
out to be the fact that is in the bill H.R. 3200.
  This country has never been to this place before, Mr. Speaker. We 
have never seen this level of audacity, and we've never seen this level 
of a criminal enterprise that's so pervasive tied up into the United 
States of America. We haven't even gotten to the SEIU and to a number 
of other affiliates that are part of all of this political agenda. It 
is something the American people are going to have to spend a lot of 
time working at studying and understanding and being outraged about 
because, in the end, we can't sustain it here on the floor of the House 
of Representatives if

[[Page H9652]]

we don't have the support outside in America, Mr. Speaker.
  I yield to the gentleman from Missouri.
  Mr. AKIN. I am encouraged, Gentleman, and it just seems to me in the 
last 6 months that many Americans, who are many great patriots--and I'm 
not talking about rich people. I'm just talking about the people who 
love our country are getting engaged. They're getting energized, and 
they're asking the question: What can we do?
  As they're busy asking these questions, all of this kind of 
information is coming out, and people are understanding, just as this 
President said that he was running on a platform of change, and many of 
us are realizing that there have to be changes inside us. The changes 
that you and I in a free enterprise system believe in are the changes 
that come in our own hearts--the changes of how we're going to run our 
businesses differently and of how we're going to do better for our 
families. Those are the kinds of changes a lot of Americans are looking 
at.
  It's not so much a change of Big Government's telling everybody what 
they're going to do. Some of the change is going to have to be 
repairing some of the moral infrastructure of our country, a sense of 
outrage over a system that has gotten out of control. Particularly as 
good old Ronald Reagan said, We're buying a lot more government than we 
can afford. I think there are a lot of Americans, regardless of their 
political affiliations, who have come to the conclusion that we are 
buying more government than we can afford, in the order of trillions of 
dollars of more government.
  I think the time is coming when there are going to have to be some 
changes here on the floor in terms of before we can get the changes 
that we need in policy, we have to rein in a beast that seems to be 
somewhat out of control, which is the Federal Government, which seems 
to be more in the business of telling us what to do than in being the 
servant of the people--the way it should be.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman from 
Missouri.
  In about, oh, the 8 or 9 minutes that, I think, we have left, Mr. 
Speaker, I would seek to just transition this just a little bit and 
take the segue on the ``government that we can't afford'' and address 
this issue.
  The President has laid out an argument. The argument is that we have 
to fix health care before we can fix the economy. The economy is in 
crisis, but it can't be fixed without fixing health care.
  When answering the question of What's wrong with health care in 
America?, he came back with two responses: one is it costs too much 
money. The other one is we have too many uninsured.
  Well, costing too much money, we can discuss that. It costs about 
14.5 percent of our GDP. In other industrialized countries, by their 
analyses, it costs about 9.5 percent of their GDP. So half again more 
for health care in the United States. I'm not sure we're half again 
richer than they are. We are richer than they are, and we can afford a 
little more, but we can have that discussion, and we can take a lot of 
it out if we would just simply do tort reform. Buying insurance across 
State lines and having a full deductibility for health insurance 
premiums could deal with some of this.
  I want to, Mr. Speaker, make this point, which is, those uninsured--
that being the biggest situation that is not resolved here by Democrats 
or Republicans. Democrats want to do socialized medicine, and 
Republicans have some other solutions. So I began to ask the question: 
Of the 47 million uninsured--that's their number, not mine. I don't 
know that it's high or low. You hear lower numbers but not higher, so 
take the higher number.

                              {time}  2100

  This number is supposed to be here. It's not on my chart, but I can 
tell you, this is 47 million. I know that. And, as you subtract from 
those lists of those that are uninsured in America, you start with the 
undocumented noncitizens, that's the illegals.
  Well, this is a new chart, so it doesn't say the things that I 
remember. I am going to go off what I remember, and these are new 
numbers, 5.2 million illegals are part of the 47 million. This number 
has been 4 million who are here that have arrived recently that are 
under the 5-year bar by law.
  These two categories of immigrants, the illegals and those 
disqualified legals becomes 10.2 million. This number shows 10.
  And those that earn more than $75,000 a year, Mr. Speaker, presumably 
they could resolve this out of the their own checkbook. Then you go for 
the Americans that are eligible for a government program but not 
enrolled. Now I see what's going on, this software has rounded it out 
to even millions. That number is 9.7 million. Those Americans that are 
eligible for government programs but not enrolled, usually Medicaid, 
didn't sign up. That's this number.
  Now we are subtracting from 47 million. This number is those eligible 
for employer-sponsored, but didn't bother to sign up or opted out. 
That's 6 million, and that is the actual decimal point. This number 
here comes down to 12.1 million Americans without affordable options.
  Now, we have too many uninsured in America, 47 million, according to 
people over on this side. But 47 million includes all these categories 
that we don't want to include in a new bill. They don't either, for the 
most part, or at least they won't admit it. So you are down to 12.1 
million people, and that's less than 4 percent of the population.
  Now, what does that mean? We are going to try to solve the problem by 
transforming 100 percent of the health insurance in America and 100 
percent of the health care delivery system in America to try to reduce 
a 4 percent number down to something less.
  Now, what is 4 percent, 12.1 million, that's these people right here, 
these are the whole uninsured. This is the whole population of the 
United States. We are a lively bunch of people in the United States. 
It's hard to get a handle on us.
  But you can get a handle on this. This is 306 or maybe 307 million 
people. These are the categories in that other pie chart that includes 
the coverage for those eligible by employer in blue; those insurance-
eligible for government programs, usually Medicare, Medicaid, in green; 
the orange are those earning over $75,000; and the black, those are 
legal immigrants that are on the 5-year bar and are not eligible. And 
the other 2 percent are the illegal immigrants. This is the 12 and 1.1 
percent right here. This little orange sliver, that's the percentage of 
the population that we want to address, because they are Americans 
without insurance who do not have affordable options.
  And the proposal is to transform all of the rest of this, the best 
there is in the world in insurance and delivery of health care, in 
order to reduce this sliver of 4 percent down to something, maybe 
around 2 percent.
  Now, I think that Einstein would have a way to define this thing, and 
I think it would come down to something such as, if you have a flawed 
premise, you will have a flawed conclusion.
  Mr. AKIN. I just appreciate the gentleman, I am not a big fan of pie 
charts, I love pie, but I don't like pie charts. But this chart, I 
think, is a good graphic. It depicts something which almost defies 
reason.
  What we are seeing is, we are going to take all of that green area, 
if you can point to that green area with your pointer, there--but I am 
talking about the turquoise area, the whole thing. We are going to 
change all of that. We are going to scrap our whole health care system, 
have it taken over by the government in order to address that little 
sort of orange-red sector.
  What that suggests to me is that somebody has an agenda, and it's 
more federalizing anything than it is really solving a problem. And 
this is something that I find, from an integrity point of view, really 
distressing, particularly as an engineer.
  I mean, we just passed the biggest tax increase in the history of our 
country because we are under the premise that CO2 is such a 
bad thing that we have got to tax everybody in order to put a tax on 
CO2. So in spite of a promise--if you are making $250,000 or 
less, you won't be taxed--in fact what we have passed in the House is, 
if you flip a light switch, you start getting taxed.
  So the simple problem is, though, if you want to get rid of 
CO2, all you have

[[Page H9653]]

to do is take the nuclear power plants--that's 20 percent of our 
electric generation in America--take the 20 percent and double it. So 
we have 40 percent of our electric coming out of nuclear. If you do 
that, you would get rid of all the CO2 from every passenger 
car in the country. And yet we have come up with this complicated, 
tremendously intrusive, huge tax increase, when you could just simply 
say in a page or two, just double the number of nuclear.
  Now, here what you have got is, you have got all this folderol about 
health care, we have got to take it over, the government has got to do 
all this stuff, and you have got 4 percent of people who are uninsured. 
It just seems like, it seems like we have made our conclusion ahead of 
time that we want our government to run everything, and our excuse is 
that little tiny 4 percent wedge. Even I like cherry pie. If all I got 
was 4 percent, it isn't worth it. It just plain isn't worth it. That's 
the obvious conclusion of your chart.
  And I appreciate you just taking us into the world of free enterprise 
and what's really going on with our Federal Government. I appreciate 
your leadership. The gentleman from Iowa is really a saint, and we are 
thankful to have some good old midwestern commonsense values here on 
the floor of the U.S. Congress.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Let me conclude. I reflect upon a pair of auto 
mechanics that run a repair shop in my hometown of Kiron called 
Sandberg Brothers. They have a sign behind their counter that says, 
``Complicated, difficult, technical nearly impossible jobs are our 
specialty. Simple jobs are beyond our comprehension.''
  I think that's what we have here. We have taken a simple job and 
turned it into a complicated, technical, difficult problem. And I think 
it falls back to the wisdom of Congressman Tom Cole, who said one day 
that highly intelligent people will always overcomplicate things. If 
they didn't, there wouldn't be any particular advantage to being highly 
intelligent.

                          ____________________