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| Home Front: Politix |
| The problem with the Obama economy? Not enough failure. |
| 2010-04-20 |
| Tim Cavanaugh, Reason Magazine ...It's not hard to persuade people these days that they're doing worse than they were 10 years ago. My own career and financial prospects are in every way worse and more hopeless than they were in 2000, and I'm ready to join any revolution that will reverse my catastrophically bad decisions and foil the shadowy enemies who have kept me down. But Judson's remedies turn out to be the same old recipe—new financial regulations, more spending on education, more accountability—that you hear from every politician. This is the problem with the new declinism. With no compelling vision of the apocalypse that doesn't involve zombies, cyborgs, or outlaw bikers, we tend to miss something obvious: The problem isn't that things are collapsing. It's that not enough things are collapsing. General Motors, AIG, and the government of California have committed enough errors to merit immediate extinction, but there they still are. Yet the political establishment continues to argue that the market needs to be prevented from delivering rough justice to sinners. President Obama, who one year ago gave us a worst-case scenario in which an unstimulated economy might hit 8 percent unemployment by this year, now presides over 10 percent unemployment but tries to bamboozle us with counterfactuals like this doozy from the 2010 State of the Union address: “If we had allowed the meltdown of the financial system, unemployment might be double what it is today.' The current recession has become the economic version of The Fantasticks, a show that keeps running long after the audience wants to move on. It's becoming increasingly clear that by not letting anything collapse, by not allowing sweet, beautiful failure to happen, the government is helping to drag out the pain. That may not be indicative of anything new, but it's enough to make you want to bulldoze a house or two. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 ION WND > BRACE YOURSELF: NEXT BUBBLE TO BURST COULD BE US$600.0TRILYUHN [or more, as per possib Derivatives Meltdown]. ARTIC - CIA FACTBOOK estimates WORLD GDP at only approxi US$60.0TRILYUHN. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2010-04-20 18:55 |
| #4 A: More cowbell? |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2010-04-20 18:51 |
| #3 If Obama had failed we wouldn't have gotten ObamaCare. He succeeded. That's bad. Now all we can do is hope he doesn't have any more success. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2010-04-20 17:11 |
| #2 Right you are, John. In economic discussions, you sometimes hear the phrase "creative destruction." When an inefficient enterprise fails, the resources that were tied up in it (capital, equipment, raw materials, employees) become available for other uses, most of which are better purposes. So long as the government is propping up--oh, say, Chrysler, for example, all the people and stuff tied up in inflicting the Dodge Caliber on an innocent and undeserving world can't be repurposed for something better. |
| Posted by: Mike 2010-04-20 13:26 |
| #1 I have mixed feelings about what this article is saying. Particularly after reading the posted article yesterday: See: "How public sector unions broke California." Rush Limbaugh has said he wants BO to fail. With all that said, my daughter and I had a conversation about this several months ago. She said let it fail, it needs to in order to get better. I said: You'd better hope that doesn't happen because what will result will make Cormac McCarthy's book (and movie) The Road look like an understatement of apocalypse. The article about public sector unions causing California to go broke would suggest maybe my daughter is correct. There may have to be failures and a purging of corruption before things get better. Clean out the entitlements, the dead wood in Congress, the earmarks, the special interest groups, etc. The system needs to take a good hot bath with grandma's old-fashioned lye soap. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2010-04-20 12:45 |