What more do you need to know about the judgment of the American left and the media in the US than that they thought Barack Obama would make a better President than Sarah Palin would make a Vice-President?
A post in two sections.
Section I
The March issue of Quadrant has an article of mine which has just been put up online. In the magazine itself the title is, The Dangerous Return of Keynesian Economics – Five Years On. What it is five years on from is an article of mine that found its way into the March 2009 issue which dealt with that very dangerous return of Keynesian economics in the form of the worldwide stimulus that economies across the world were beginning to apply. The original title was The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics for which this was the single most important passage:
Just as the causes of this downturn cannot be charted through a Keynesian demand deficiency model, neither can the solution. The world’s economies are not suffering from a lack of demand and the right policy response is not a demand stimulus. Increased public sector spending will only add to the market confusions that already exist.
What is potentially catastrophic would be to try to spend our way to recovery. The recession that will follow will be deep, prolonged and potentially take years to overcome.
That this outcome was absolutely assured in my own mind is, of course, not the same as it being absolute assured in reality. And indeed, it is not too much to say that 99% of the economic opinion of the world went quite the other way. The best example of this attitude may be seen in this comment made to me by Senator Doug Cameron during my appearance before the Senate Economic References Committee in September 2009.
Why have the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, why have they got it so wrong and yet you in your ivory tower at RMIT have got it so right?
This is, of course, a question I ask myself but also one for which I have an answer. The odd part is that no one else asks this question although it is the question that ought to go to the heart of the matter. Which takes me to the second part of this post.
Section II
The economics I use I did not invent but am near enough unique in applying it to economic questions in the modern world. This is the economic theories of the cycle as developed by classical economists which was the theory accepted universally across the profession prior to the coming of the Keynesian Revolution in 1936. So to see things as I see things about the nature of this theory, let me take you to the opening part of a form I have just sent to my publisher on how to advertise the second edition of my Free Market Economics. It was a book whose first edition I wrote at white heat over the twelve weeks of the first semester in 2009, from March to May, to explain in more detail why the stimulus would with certainty fail, as fail it did.
1. Please describe the book in non-technical layman’s terms (in no more than 150 words). Include brief details of the book’s main objectives and conclusions.
Have you ever wondered why no public sector stimulus has ever worked? You are holding in your hands a book that is unique in our times. It is a text on economic principles based on the economics before Keynesian theory became dominant in macroeconomics and equilibrium analysis became standard in micro. It looks at economics from the perspective of an entrepreneur making decisions in a world where the future is unknown, innovation occurs at virtually every moment, and the future is being created before it can be understood.
Of particular significance, this book assumes Keynesian theory is flawed and policies built around attempting to increase aggregate demand by increasing non-value-adding public spending can never succeed but will only make conditions worse. The theories discussed are the theories that dominated economic discourse prior to the Keynesian Revolution and are thus grounded in the economics of some of the greatest economists who have ever lived.
It is, of course, possible that I might have been right for the wrong reasons, but it might also be the case that I was right for the right reasons. I go on about Say’s Law, John Stuart Mill and classical theory, but you know, when have they ever let me down? The world, so far as the evidence shows, works exactly like their theory says it does. And it’s not even that I picked this downturn as a one-off instance, but I also picked the upturn that followed the massive cuts to public spending after the Costello budget in 1996. Who else did that then? What theory is there other than the classical theory of the cycle that could even explain it let alone predict it? And there is no other text anywhere in the world written more recently than the 1920s that can tell you what that theory is other than mine.
You could, of course, buy the first edition right now or you can wait until the much improved second edition is published in July or August.
Ever wonder why his university transcripts are unavailable. Wonder no more.
UPDATE: Another take on the same moment.
Spelling R-E-S-P-E-C-T should not be difficult but is within the capabilities of any properly educated individual. Obama hesitates, either because of a teleprompter breakdown or because he really doesn’t know how to spell the word off the top of his head. George Bush may have had a few such moments, and Dan Quayle actually was given a cue-card by the teacher that had “potatoe” on it. But this is significant because someone who thinks there are 57 states in the US, and cannot spell a simple word whose spelling is actually repeated twice in Aretha Franklin’s song, is making decisions that will affect all of us into the distant future. Just how ignorant is he?
But do you think this is going to be an issue for the American mainstream? The media bias in the US is so tremendous that they make our ABC seem almost impartial. The US now seems to choose presidents in much the same way they choose American Idol. Populist Cool wins against Wonky Competence. Obama will feel no embarrassment since that is not in its nature being in his own mind perfect in every way. But the US should feel embarrassment that their system has allowed an incompetent, shallow, far-left poseur to reach the top of its political tree. And with Hillary maybe next, it has a fair chance of continuing for as far as the eye can see.
There is probably no one closer to my view of things than Ann Coulter. It is not just what she believes but the venom she feels for the lowlife on the opposite side of politics. These are not just gentlemen’s disagreements. These are differences so vast that there is no bridging the gaps. I am lost when I try to see the reason behind what Democrats, and leftists in general, are up to in almost all the things they do. It is not kindness and generosity of spirit. It is a false version of such attitudes, deployed purely for the sake of power. Here Ann goes over the Democrat foreign policy disasters going back to JFK. She could go back to Woodrow Wilson and FDR where she would find even worse but there’s only so much you can say in 800 words. The article is titled, Crimea River:
It’s pointless to pay attention to foreign policy when a Democrat is president, unless you enjoy having your stomach in a knot. As long as a Democrat sits in the White House, America will be repeatedly humiliated, the world will become a much more dangerous place — and there’s absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. (Though this information might come in handy when voting for president, America!)
The following stroll down memory lane is but the briefest of summaries. For a full accounting of Democratic national security disasters, please read my book, “Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.”
— JFK:
John F. Kennedy was in the White House for less than three years and, if you think he screwed a lot of hookers, just look what he did to our foreign policy.
Six months after becoming president, JFK had his calamitous meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna — a meeting The New York Times described as “one of the more self-destructive American actions of the Cold War, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.” (The Times admitted that a half-century later. At the time, the Newspaper of Record lied about the meeting.)
For two days, Khrushchev batted Kennedy around, leaving the president’s own advisers white-faced and shaken. Kennedy’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze called the meeting “just a disaster.”
Khrushchev was delighted to discover that the U.S. president was so “weak.” A Russian aide said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.”
Seeing he was dealing with a naif, Khrushchev promptly sent missiles to Cuba. The Kennedy Myth Machine has somehow turned JFK’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis into a brilliant foreign policy coup. The truth is: (1) Russia would never have dared move missiles to Cuba had Khrushchev not realized that JFK was a nincompoop; and (2) it wasn’t a victory.
In exchange for Russia’s laughably empty threats about Cuba, JFK removed our missiles from Turkey — a major retreat. As Khrushchev put it in his memoirs: “It would have been ridiculous for us to go to war over Cuba — for a country 12,000 miles away. For us, war was unthinkable. We ended up getting exactly what we’d wanted all along, security for Fidel Castro’s regime and American missiles removed from Turkey.”
— LBJ:
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, famously escalated the war in Vietnam simply to prove that the Democrats could be trusted with national security.
As historian David Halberstam describes it, LBJ “would talk to his closest political aides about the McCarthy days, of how Truman lost China and then the Congress and the White House and how, by God, Johnson was not going to be the president who lost Vietnam and then the Congress and the White House.”
LBJ’s incompetent handling of that war allowed liberals to spend the next half-century denouncing every use of American military force as “another Vietnam.”
— CARTER:
Jimmy Carter warned Americans about their “inordinate fear of communism” and claimed to have been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit.
His most inspired strategic move was to abandon the Shah of Iran, a loyal U.S. ally, which gave rise to the global Islamofascist movement we’re still dealing with today. By allowing the Shah to be overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1979, Carter handed Islamic crazies their first state.
Before the end of the year, the Islamic lunatics had taken 52 Americans hostage in Tehran, where they remained for 444 days.
The hostages were released only minutes after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration for reasons succinctly captured in a Jeff MacNelly cartoon. It shows Khomeini reading a telegram aloud: “It’s from Ronald Reagan. It must be about one of the Americans in the Den of Spies, but I don’t recognize the name. It says ‘Remember Hiroshima.'”
— CLINTON:
Bill Clinton’s masterful handling of foreign policy was such a catastrophe that he had to deploy his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, to steal classified documents from the National Archives in 2003 to avoid their discovery by the 9/11 commission.
Twice, when Clinton was president, Sudan had offered to turn over bin Laden to the U.S. But, unfortunately, these offers came in early 1996 when Clinton was busy ejaculating on White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Clinton rebuffed Sudan’s offers.
According to Michael Scheuer, who ran the bin Laden unit at the CIA for many years, Clinton was given eight to 10 chances to kill or capture bin Laden but refused to act, despite bin Laden’s having murdered hundreds of Americans in terrorist attacks around the world. Would that one of those opportunities had arisen on the day of Clinton’s scheduled impeachment! Instead of pointlessly bombing Iraq, he might have finally taken out bin Laden.
— OBAMA:
When Obama took office, al Qaida had been routed in Iraq — from Fallujah, Sadr City and Basra. Muqtada al-Sadr — the Dr. Phil of Islamofascist radicalism — had waddled off in retreat to Iran. The Iraqis had a democracy, a miracle on the order of flush toilets in Afghanistan.
By Bush’s last year in office, monthly casualties in Iraq were coming in slightly below a weekend with Justin Bieber. In 2008, there were more than three times as many homicides in Chicago as U.S. troop deaths in the Iraq War. (Chicago: 509; Iraq: 155).
On May 30, The Washington Post reported: “CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays (al-Qaida) as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world …” Even hysterics at The New York Times admitted that al-Qaida and other terrorist groups had nearly disappeared from Southeast Asia by 2008.
A few short years into Obama’s presidency — and al-Qaida is back! For purely political reasons, as soon as he became president, Obama removed every last troop from Iraq, despite there being Americans troops deployed in dozens of countries around the world.
In 2004, nearly 100 soldiers, mostly Marines, died in the battle to take Fallujah from al-Qaida. Today, al-Qaida’s black flag flies above Fallujah.
Bush won the war, and Obama gave it back.
Obama couldn’t be bothered with preserving America’s victory in Iraq. He was busy helping to topple a strong American ally in Egypt and a slavish American minion in Libya — in order to install the Muslim Brotherhood in those countries instead. (That didn’t work out so well for U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans murdered in Benghazi.)
So now, another Russian leader is playing cat-and-mouse with an American president — and guess who’s the mouse? Putin has taunted Obama in Iran, in Syria and with Edward Snowden. By now, Obama has become such an object for Putin’s amusement that the fastest way to get the Russians out of Crimea would be for Obama to call on Putin to invade Ukraine.
This is from a form I have just sent to the publisher on how to advertise the second edition of my Free Market Economics.
1. Please describe the book in non-technical layman’s terms (in no more than 150 words). Include brief details of the book’s main objectives and conclusions.
Have you ever wondered why no public sector stimulus has ever worked? You are holding in your hands a book that is unique in our times. It is a text on economic principles based on the economics before Keynesian theory became dominant in macroeconomics and equilibrium analysis became standard in micro. It looks at economics from the perspective of an entrepreneur making decisions in a world where the future is unknown, innovation occurs at virtually every moment, and the future is being created before it can be understood.
Of particular significance, this book assumes Keynesian theory is flawed and policies built around attempting to increase aggregate demand by increasing non-value-adding public spending can never succeed but will only make conditions worse. The theories discussed are the theories that dominated economic discourse prior to the Keynesian Revolution and are thus grounded in the economics of some of the greatest economists who have ever lived.
I might also mention this which is a notice I received this week from the publisher:
I am delighted to be writing to all of our authors, contributors, customers and business partners with the exciting news that Edward Elgar Publishing has won another important industry award.
The Frankfurt Book Fair Academic & Professional Publisher of the Year 2014 award was presented to us by the Independent Publishers Guild at a ceremony on Thursday evening.
The judges commented that Edward Elgar Publishing turned in a very impressive sales growth in 2013, achieved on the back of a prolific publishing programme and successful Elgaronline platform. Judges liked its smart customer profiling and forays into international markets. “Edward Elgar is incredibly professional, responsive and imaginative. It is a great example of how a relatively small publisher can be at least as innovative as those many times its size.”
This is seriously incredible. The man with the camera is Vladimir Putin, then with the KGB and just starting his climb to the top, here pretending he is just a normal soviet tourist who just happens to have come by at the same time as the American President. From the story:
While on his visit, former Russian Premiere Gorbachev directed Reagan towards a number of “tourists” who then asked him politically charged questions about human rights.
At one point, Pete Souza, the photographer who snapped this picture, turned to the secret service and commented, “I can’t believe these tourists in the Soviet Union are asking these pointed questions.” The agent replied, “Oh, these are KGB families.”
Andrew Bolt has quite a neat list of what divides left and right, socialists and conservatives, progressives and small-l liberals, or however you might like to name and frame the differences between the two sides of politics. This is in answer to the ABC’s Jonathan Green who thinks that he, like the rest of the ABC, represents the middle ground. This is the list to which no doubt others might be added.
– restrictions on free speech
– the retribalising of our nation
– changing the constitution to effectively divide us by race
– our high levels of immigration
– massive overspending on entitlements and welfare schemes
– workplace restriction which employers say cost jobs and investment
– government handouts to prop up companies from Qantas to car-makers, involving billions of dollars and thousands of jobs
– preventing illegal immigration, which under Labor was reaching levels approaching 40,000 people a year
– the global warming faith and its carbon tax, responsible in part for the loss of thousands of Australian jobs
– the Renewable Energy Target, who helps make electricity a luxury for the poor without doing anything for the environment
– the green bans on nuclear power and on dams to water our growing cities.
– appeasing or defying rising Third World or developing powers such as China
– surrendering elements of our self-government to multinational fora such as the United Nations
– limiting the reach and bias of our massive state media
– green restrictions on the use of our natural resources, costing possibly tens of thousands of jobs
– how to fight Islamist extremism, already responsible for the loss of hundreds of Australian lives
For more on these issues, there is an interesting article, naturally written by someone on the left, that deals with Are left and right a feature (or bug) of evolution?. It’s a review of two books that look at politics and evolution. You should read it all, but this I thought was precious:
Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.” No wonder, then, that they often cannot agree. These experiments suggest that conservatives actually do live in a world that is more scary and threatening, at least as they perceive it. Trying to argue them out of it is pointless and naive. It’s like trying to argue them out of their skin.
I, of course, see this in exactly the reverse way. It is the Candides of the left who see no danger and create havoc through their ignorance and blindness to actual problems they ignore. Every one of the issues raised on Andrew’s list is a minefield for which so far as I can see there is not a single realistic solution being offered by the left.
Let’s see if anything is missing here. This is taken from the Wikipedia entry on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC):
The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey became the committee’s first chairman. Under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the 79th Congress, the committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked “the form of government guaranteed by our Constitution.”
What’s missing? The political party to which Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey belonged. For that, you have to go to the next level where we find:
Edward Joseph Hart was an American DEMOCRATIC PARTY politician who represented New Jersey’s 14th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 1935-1955.
So we are seeing nothing new here these seventy odd years later. It’s the same party bringing it all back again.
The modern progressive movement admires their predecessors’ stand against McCarthy so deeply that references to that inauspicious period of American history are regularly deployed in liberal publications and media outlets.
Those noble principles apparently go right out the window when Democrats face what increasingly appears to be a catastrophic political landscape heading into the 2014 midterm election cycle. Political handicappers beginning to suggest Republicans have better than even odds of recapturing the upper chamber of Congress in November as Democratic officeholders struggle to defend the political millstone that has become of the Affordable Care Act. Rather than surrender to their fates, Democrats have taken to identifying their own shadowy boogeyman wrecking America from within.
So it is to be the Koch Brothers who will be used as the focus, under the Alinskyite prescription of personalising the enemy which is the approach one takes when supporters are generally not very bright and abstract thought eludes them.
And to go back just a bit, the predecessor to HUAC was the Dies Committee
On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (DEMOCRAT-TX), and therefore known as the Dies Committee.
In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan but decided against doing so, prompting known anti-black committee member John E. Rankin (DEMOCRAT-MS) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution."[12] Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project.
Investigating communists was an afterthought when the Democrats refused to investigate the Ku Klux Klan! What a shameful history the Democrats have but what is even more shameful is the way history is distorted to make it seem that it was all Republican and all by themselves. And the interesting part about Dies is that he was as much an anti-communist as Joe McCarthy. He is saved from modern contempt on the left only because of his party affiliation.
[The Mediate story on McCarthyism and the Koch Brothers is via Instapundit]
There is no reason for me to put this up other than how well I remember the times. The 1950s were actually, for those living in the non-communist West, the best decade of the past century. The hippie life of the ’60s and its protests and drug culture grew out of the easy life we had created for ourselves. We sought a bit more challenge. Well, we have certainly created challenges for our way of life, to the extent that I don’t think it will survive.
Via Five Feet of Fury.
How do you solve a problem like Obama? He combines that fantastic combination of arrogance, ignorance, laziness and stupidity, and yet with the American institutional respect for the Presidency (at least amongst Republicans) it is hard to get Americans to make personal statements about their head of state. So now the Iranians have done it for us:
President Barack Obama is a “low-IQ US president,” whose threat to launch a military offensive should nuclear talks fail is an oft-cited punchline in the Islamic Republic, particularly among children, an Iranian general said on Tuesday.
“The low-IQ US president and his country’s Secretary of State John Kerry speak of the effectiveness of ‘the US options on the table’ on Iran while this phrase is mocked at and has become a joke among the Iranian nation, especially the children,” General Masoud Jazayeri said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.
You don’t often find me agreeing with Iranian generals. The effect of marijuana on the intelligence of adolescents is well understood and there was the young Barack, member of the “Choom Gang” in his high school days. But it is even potentially worse than that if we come to this editorial in The Washington Post of all places, titled President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy:
FOR FIVE YEARS, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was a world in which “the tide of war is receding” and the United States could, without much risk, radically reduce the size of its armed forces. Other leaders, in this vision, would behave rationally and in the interest of their people and the world. Invasions, brute force, great-power games and shifting alliances — these were things of the past. Secretary of State John F. Kerry displayed this mindset on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday when he said, of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine, “It’s a 19th century act in the 21st century.”
That’s a nice thought, and we all know what he means. A country’s standing is no longer measured in throw-weight or battalions. The world is too interconnected to break into blocs. A small country that plugs into cyberspace can deliver more prosperity to its people (think Singapore or Estonia) than a giant with natural resources and standing armies.
Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin has not received the memo on 21st-century behavior. Neither has China’s president, Xi Jinping, who is engaging in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and the weaker nations of Southeast Asia. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is waging a very 20th-century war against his own people, sending helicopters to drop exploding barrels full of screws, nails and other shrapnel onto apartment buildings where families cower in basements. These men will not be deterred by the disapproval of their peers, the weight of world opinion or even disinvestment by Silicon Valley companies. They are concerned primarily with maintaining their holds on power.
This sense that Obama lacks a fixed sense of reality, that he is incapable of dealing with conditions as they are, is also found in an article by Elliot Abrams which is titled, If he believes it, it must be so and subtitled, “Obama’s scary interview”. Here is his summing up of Obama’s thoughts on Iran:
When it comes to Iran, Obama shows an attitude that can only be described as solipsistic: what’s in his mind is reality. And any other reality is just plain silly.
He has his own private reality that is not shared by any of his major advisors. A low-IQ president with a private reality of his own who will not listen to anyone else is not a good bet at making serious decisions.
How can Obama be influenced? At the moment in many cases he is prevented from doing what he might wish to because of constitutional constraints. But how can he actually be influenced? I can only think that that Iranian general might be onto something. Just call him stoopid. Say out loud that what he is doing is stoopid. That he is stoopid. His decisions are stoopid. His policies are stoopid. It’s just a thought but given that other obvious characteristic of the Obama personality, his incredible vanity, it might at least get him to concentrate a bit more on the issues and less on playing golf and shooting hoops. The US is heading for a train wreck, and will take the rest of us with it if he can’t be stopped. If they won’t impeach him, they must find some way to discipline him so that the stated policies of a president of the United States are no longer seen as an international joke.
Law of Markets 