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A wealth-eater administration
The Derb man strikes againIf professional investment advisors sometimes can't make sense of the economy, how good do you think politicians and bureaucrats are at it? Right. They don't have the beginning of a clue. Keep that in mind when you hear them talk about "stimulating consumption" and "creating jobs." The congresscritters, paper-shufflers, and gubmint time-servers of Washington D.C. don't have a freaking clue. They're not wealth-creators; they're wealth-eaters. That includes the new administration. Why would they have a clue? Very few of them have ever done anything an ordinary citizen would recognize as work. Here's the Obama cabinet. Attorney General Eric Holder Government lawyering Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack Lawyering, politics Secretary of Commerce Judd Gregg Lawyering, politics Secretary of Defense Robert Gates CIA, MilInt Secretary of Education Arne Duncan Education bureaucrat (never taught) Secretary of Energy Steven Chu Research physicist, academic Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano Lawyering, politics Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan Govt. bureaucrat Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar Lawyering, politics Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis Professional Hispanic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Politician's wife, Politician Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood High School teaching, politics Secretary of the Treasury Timothy_Geithner Lobbyist, bureaucrat, diplomat, tax evader Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Eric Shinseki Military Just look at those résumés! Military service is certainly honorable; Steven Chu seems to have added something to human understanding and capability; and I suppose there is some necessary number of lawyers, bureaucrats, and even politicians we have to put up with. (Though in these days of telecommuting, I don't see why they can't all be sequestered on one of the Aleutian Islands so we don't have to look at their sleek, smug, self-important faces.) Nobody in that list, though, not one, has any acquaintance with the production of wealth. Our civilization rests on our having enough citizens possessed of the ability to turn a nickel into a dime, and a government that keeps out of the way while they do it. Nobody in Obama's cabinet has any idea how to turn nickels into dimes, least of all the Wealth-Eater-in-Chief. In his autobiography, Obama described his one brief experience in the world of private enterprise as a sort of endurance test--a purgatory he had to suffer before ascending to the heaven of "community organizing." He felt, he tells us, "like a spy behind enemy lines." Those private-sector money-grubbers, trying to squeeze some wealth out of a reluctant world--that's the enemy in Obama's universe. A friend would presumably be someone who squeezes wealth out of big, litigation-whipped corporations, guilty white liberals, foundations taken over by leftist ideologues, and of course the ever-milkable taxpayer. This is an administration of wealth-eaters and wealth-spenders, not wealth-creators. If you were to sit at Obama's cabinet table with all officers present and ask them where money comes from, they would reply in happy unison: "Why, from a government paycheck, of course! Everybody knows that!" The grubby, demeaning work of pulling things out of the earth, or harvesting things grown on the earth's surface, or turning things into other things, or persuading people to buy things--all of that is mysterious to them, and they would prefer it to remain so. We should, therefore, do well to heed the words of Arnold Kling: Sooner or later the U.S. government is going to have to get serious about stripping the assets of those of us who have tried to live within our means. Sooner or later, the profligate are going to take from the prudent, the grasshopper is going to confiscate the property of the ants. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-02-11 |
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