Sobre los poderes, la inutilidad del Congreso y la confianza a los funcionarios publicos.

Oh boy!...que semana tuvimos!

Muy buen comentario de Eric Posner:

"No one expects Congress to act in any meaningful sense.

The executive has nearly unlimited discretion, relies on mostly secret information, and therefore its actions cannot be evaluated by outsiders. We can only trust that executive officials know what they are doing. People say, at least, we can trust Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke. They seem competent and have the country’s interests at heart. But that’s what people used to say about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. We really have no idea whether Paulson and Bernanke are making wise decisions, dumb decisions, or even politically motivated decisions—say, bailing out firms in which political allies have interests and not otherwise, or firms with lots of workers in politically important swing states. Sometime in the future, we may be able to evaluate their decisions, at which point our sole means of expressing our displeasure if those decisions were bad ones would be by voting against the person chiefly responsible for their appointments, George Bush—um, never mind.

...

Some loans may not be wise unless the lender can more or less control the borrower and can earn a portion of the upside, which just means that the Fed should have the power to purchase equity as well as debt. Going forward, all that Congress can do is provide even greater statutory discretion by expanding old authorities, so that next time round there will be no doubts about legality, and hope that the Fed does not abuse this discretion. There is, and can be, no serious debate about the best way to respond to the emergency in advance of it, and no time to have a debate during it. So Congress proves itself again an utterly helpless institution. It can whine today, hold oversight hearings tomorrow, and dutifully hand over more authority to the Fed on the next day. In the meantime, bad decisions by our government during this financial crisis, and future ones as well, will harm Americans and people around the world just as much as bad war-on-terror decisions do. Sorry, my libertarian friends; this is the world we live in. And there is no conceivable alternative.