Last Friday at lunch, I headed down to Marquette University to hear Paul Ryan speak as part of the "On the Issues" series with Mike Gousha.  You can listen to the webcast, or watch the video here.  In fact, about 40 minutes into the video, you can even here me asking Paul a question... along with a couple follow up questions as he tried to politically maneuver around the inconvenient truth... that the economy is full of contradictions, and that nobody can have everything.

As I go through my notes from the event, I'm struck by the contradictions that filled the entire hour.  I don't Paul personally accountable for them, because... well... everyone seems to believe in these contradictions.  Here is a sampling of the contradictions we heard during the hour.

1.  First he said that the Fed's current monetary policy seems to be correct now. Later on, he talked about one of the causes of the crisis was that the Fed was giving away too much easy money.  So cheap money back then was bad, but all of a sudden even cheaper money is good now.

2.  Paul talked a lot about how he was against creating a Western European Style economy.  He later tried to justify his vote on the auto bailout.  He did this by talking about how he wanted to make sure the money didn't come out of TARP funds (which is illegal by my reading of the TARP law), but never spoke word one about how it was creating a dangerous government intervention in private enterprise like they do in Western Europe.  He also mentioned some sort of "secret" talks with GM.  It all sounded very cloak and dagger.  Of course, in the old fashioned United States of America, a Representative would have no say in how GM ran its business... it's a good thing we're not in a Western European Style economy.

3.  He talked extensively about how one of the current problem we have is a "Counter Party Trust Problem".  That means that there are many stable banks out there, and a few unstable banks out there, but nobody knows which banks are stable and which ones aren't, which keeps people from lending out of fear they might be lending to a bad bank.  He later talked about how it was not bad that Ben Bernanke forced banks that didn't want TARP money to take it, because if some banks took it, and other banks didn't, it would make people aware of which banks were good and bad.

4.  Of course, the funniest moment was when Paul used the line (and repeated it later) that Republicans were amateur big spenders, and that now the pro's were in charge.  Is that really true?  After all, Medicare Part D, the Iraq War, TARP and the Auto Bailout all came under Republican control, among other things.  Granted, the "Stimulus" is pretty damn big, but I wouldn't call the other things I mentioned to be amateur in any way.

5.  Paul talked about the Democrats were being dishonest in their budgeting of the Iraq War.  He talked about how they have declared that they are going to budget the war at surge levels until 2012, but then draw down troops over the next 18 months.  They'll then take the the difference, call it a surplus, and spend it on other things.  Of course, Republicans were just as dishonest about Iraq War spending.  They had budgeted almost the entire war using "supplemental emergency funds" which encourages pork, allows the Pentagon to spend even more during its normal budgeting because Iraq wasn't included, and the use of emergency funds no longer requires cuts in other parts of the budget to offset them since the Budget Enforcement Act expired in 2002.  You can read more about that here.

The list goes on and on.  Everyone complains about how housing prices keep going down, unless you're trying to buy a house, in which case it's great.  Perhaps that's not right.  Everyone loves affordable housing right... well... except for the house I'm trying to sell.

The myth that anyone in Washington has all the knowledge necessary to solve any of these problems through some sort of law boggles my mind.  The only thing they can do is continue to distort the markets, so that nobody in this economy will have any confidence that a deal they make might hold, or that a business they start won't come under fire from Washington.  The surest way to a stronger economy is for Washington to stop messing with things... whether it's "Green Stimulus", or bailing out auto companies.

On the plus side, after the talk, I had a chance to speak with John McAdams from the Marquette Warrior blog.  It's always great to have a chance to connect with a blogger in real life.