Where to begin? How about the very first sentence of the New York Times article hailing passage of the Dodd-Frank financial bill? According to the illustrious fishwrap, “sweeping expansion of federal financial regulation” reflects “a renewed mistrust of financial markets after decades in which Washington stood back from Wall Street with wide-eyed admiration.”

We’ve seen some liberalization of financial dealings over the years. It was once illegal to own gold. Travelers can be glad of the rise of interstate banking after governments began to permit it in the 1980s.

But have politicians really offered nothing but “wide-eyed admiration” for “Wall Street” for “decades”? Has the federal government really been hands-off till now?

Take Senators Dodd and Frank. They were out front pushing home ownership on people who could not afford homes, with multiple programs and legislative packages. This bubble-making process was further inflated (quite literally) by the Federal Reserve’s cheap credit policies. Many lenders, encouraged by government-provided (but perverse) incentives, jumped onto the Irresponsibility Bandwagon in the run-up to collapse.

So how can the “solution” be additional bailout authority . . . which will further encourage bankers and others to invest unwisely?

And the new regulations — these, too, are supposed to help? We don’t even know what they are yet, because bureaucrats have yet to write them, as specified (vaguely) by Congress. In addition to their burden, they will allow pols to shake down Wall Street for years to come.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Last week I noted the revival of interest in F.A. Hayek’s classic political tract, The Road to Serfdom. This week? The ongoing revival of interest in Hayek’s theory of boom and bust.

According to economist Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., today’s debate about stimulus spending mirrors the debate in the Great Depression between John Maynard Keynes and Hayek. Republished letters from October, 1932, Times of London, are eerily up-to-date.

The letter from Keynes and his allies, arguing that spending — any spending whatsoever — would spring the economy out of depression strikes me as a tad bizarre. All spending is equal? Make that several tads bizarre.

Can you say déjà vu?

The Hayekian response seems at once more sophisticated as well as commonsensical. For instance, Hayek recommended an immediate repeal of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff. He recognized a major factor for the Depression’s low expectations and business doldrums: The trade-killing legislation that hit the New York Times’s front page the day before Black Tuesday, 1929.

O’Driscoll and other economists have been making much of the enduring significance of the Hayek-Keynes debate. But there are differences between the Depression and now, aren’t there?

Back then, the loss part of the profit-and-loss system hadn’t been so completely undermined by recovery policy. Today we have bailouts, and these only increase risk-taking, likely to make the next bust even bigger — and today’s Keynesianism perhaps worse than the disease itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Like the medical insurance coverage you have now? Don’t worry, you can keep it under the new “health care” regime . . . Or so President Obama and his Democratic allies promised during the recent debates over reform of medical insurance and delivery institutions.

Now we’re now learning, per “internal White House documents,” that the insurance plans we were told would enjoy grandfathered protection under the new law won’t be immune at all. Looks like more than half of current company plans must be chucked by 2013.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Apparently, the goal has always been destruction of private insurance. But why? Well, so government can swoop in to “rescue” us after private firms collapse under the weight of all the new taxes and regulations.

The State of Massachusetts offers a preview of what awaits us. Insurance regulators there were recently warned by a department in charge of “monitoring solvency” that a new round of price caps on insurance rates would jeopardize private insurers’ solvency. Officials imposed the caps anyway. Now those private firms face losses that, if the price controls persist, can lead only to bankruptcy.

Despite all this, there is a way to keep your current health insurance coverage. All folks in Congress have to do is repeal their recent “reforms.” All you have to do is make sure they do.

To ensure that you have better options in the future? Well, very different reforms will be required. And repeals of different laws.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Sometimes politicians name their legislation the better to hide what they are trying to do. The name fails to disclose, you might say.

Consider the so-called DISCLOSE Act, which just passed the House of Representatives by a mostly party-line vote of 219-206 and is now awaiting action in the Senate. The full name of the monstrosity is the Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act. It should be called the Democracy Is Undermined by Rigging the Game to Favor Incumbents and Especially Democrats Act.

The goal is to hamper political advertising by independent groups and corporations by requiring disclosure of the names of contributors who give above $600 a year. The new rules would harm corporations more than unions, and would foist anew some of the same burdens on First Amendment rights just overturned by the Supreme Court. The same court that threw out chunks of McCain-Feingold on free speech grounds would also likely find DISCLOSE unconstitutional.

But could the court do so before the 2010 elections? Democrats like Hank Johnson ― who told fellow partisans that the Act, if passed, would stop Republicans from being elected ― are betting that it can’t. Their hope is that with the speech-shackling new law skewing things in their favor until the high court acts, they’ll be more likely to escape political annihilation in November.

No, we can’t wait for the Supremes on this one. Call your senator.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

There’s this old joke. “How do you know when a politician is lying? He’s moving his lips.”

Regarding President Obama’s recent speech about the ongoing oil spill disaster, Byron York of the Washington Examiner noted “one particularly striking moment . . .

midway through his talk, Obama acknowledged that he had approved new offshore drilling a few weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20. But Obama said he had done so only “under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe.”

York then quoted industry experts swearing on a stack of scientific reports that, regarding oil drilling, there is no such thing as “absolutely safe.” So, the intrepid reporter wanted to know, who told Obama that new deep sea oil drilling would be safe?

Long story short: He got a lot of administrative runaround from the Administration.

But who in their right mind believes anything is “absolutely safe”? Water isn’t. Chewing gum isn’t. As Thomas Sowell has explained in books like Applied Economics, we never choose between the risky and the absolutely safe. There’s risk all around. And trade-offs.

Assuming that Obama is not a nitwit (a pretty safe assumption), when he spoke the “absolutely safe” line, he simply wasn’t being honest.

Why? Because he looks bad. But this could have been an opportunity for America (and its president) to confront reality.

Of course, for a sitting politician, that’s the furthest thing from safe.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.