Monthly Archives: December 2008

Obama could give us a better deal

First of all, lets point something out: Obama has amazing popularity still and he has credibility in offering us a change from politics as usual.

Debt and spend is politics as usual.

I have no dounbt that President-elect Obama means well. But he doesn’t understand economics.  No one in power does.  Keynsianism was developed to justify the use of power at the expense of the public good, providing a rationalization for saying it was good for the public.  As long as its lies are believed, politicians will continue to consume us and their own children.  So that’s what we’re stuck with. We’d probably get a substantially identical position from McCain.  The only thing that makes Obama worse is that he may have the power to change the status quo if he could see the need to do so.

It is sad to see a lost opportunity.

What needs to happen right now is obvious to everyone.  Americans need more jobs that pay a sufficient wage.  The only way that can happen however, is if industries are started or renewed that provide real goods and services.  What the Obama Administration is going to do is prevent people from investing and innovating to find and invent this new economy.  He is going to siphon the potential labor market away from this development into his wishlist of things to do.  A lot of those things are really good ideas.  (I have to admit, even though I want better and cheaper broadband, I found that technocratic riff particularly painful to watch.  It was such a “I’m cool and I’ll support the cool people” moment.  Yuck.)  But even if these are good ideas in themselves, they are not necessarily rationale priorities at this point in time.  Yes, energy efficiency is good.  But if you are spending money you don’t have and siphoning off the labor pool from entrepreneurs, then inefficient electric lights are actually more efficient.  Politicians need to understand that sometimes the car you own, despite its problems, is preferable to the car you want to buy on debt you can’t afford to pay back.

So, as I see it, this economic hardship is going to be lengthened and maybe even worsened by Obama’s economic team.  I repeat, McCain would probably do much the same thing.  So this is not a partisan critique.  But Obama has persuasive powers lacking by just about anyone since Reagan.  In a sense, McCain would be preferable because more people would be apt to be skeptical about his grandiose promises to take immediate action.  I just wish Obama would use his leadership to suggest a really helpful policy for our economic hardship, one that allows the market to fix the economic mess the government has given us.