Posted on 07/26/2010 7:40:26 AM PDT by Kaslin
There are many people, smart and good people, who are deeply confused about the direction of the current administration. They are baffled as to why Barack Obama and his acolytes cannot see what is happening to our economy. I encountered one of these good people recently, and engaged in an eye-opening conversation.
I contacted a gentleman who holds some real estate investments, and with whom I’ve done some business in the past. We had met through Republican politics, but I sensed he was really uncommitted politically and certainly was no staunch Republican. It all started when he asked me how I was doing.
I replied that I was doing great, which is almost always true. Even when things are challenging – like they are today – I am thankful to be an American Jew living in this country, the greatest country in the history of mankind, with a beautiful wife, two wonderful children, and three terrific dogs. He said “You’re doing great? You are the only one I talk to who is doing great. All my tenants are struggling. These people in the Administration are so smart, why don’t they understand what is going on out here?”
What an opening – how could I pass on that one? So I told him what I thought he understood already. Yes, the folks in the Administration may be smart, but they have no experience. Virtually none of them has ever participated in the free enterprise system creating income and jobs, so how – and why – would you expect them to create policies that would help entrepreneurs and small-business owners move the economy forward. They may be smart, they may be great at writing papers and drawing charts with arrows and symbols, but they are fairly low on wisdom. Wisdom comes from suffering experiences in life – not just living arcane social and economic theories.
A perfect example of this wisdom deficiency is the newest member of the administration, Donald Berwick, the man chosen to administer the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. These two behemoth bureaucracies consume 4% of our gross domestic product, and that’s even before Obamacare vastly increases the amount of money running through their bureaucratic fingers. So one might think Dr. Berwick would have had some experience running a major medical operation or a similar entity. It turns out that his most significant position was as President of the non-profit Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). If you go to the IHI website, they self-describe the organization as “a small organization with a very big mission.” Not exactly the credentials most of us would consider when looking for someone to run an organization that dispenses hundreds of billions of dollars. The important thing is Dr. Berwick has studied health care organizations and written heady papers and pontificated in speeches about how the health care system should be run. That should be good enough. Since that is the background of our President and almost all of his advisors, Dr. Berwick seems to be a natural choice.
The problem is that the left-wing rabble that comprises the Obama administration – having never done it themselves – have no understanding of how money is created other than by encouraging the federal reserve to print some more. They have no appreciation of what makes this country great, as described by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. She wrote “To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money –and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes by conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.” The people running our country not only have never created a dollar’s worth of wealth, they appear to have a visceral disdain for those who do.
These government wonks repeatedly insist that federal intervention and control is the solution, but some of their own brethren have proven them wrong through an extensive study. Three Harvard Business School Professors, Lauren Cohen, Joshua Coval and Chris Malloy, examined the effects of increased spending over 42 years when 232 Senators or Congressmen became committee chairs and funneled federal dollars to their states or districts. The study shows that the jump in federal funds significantly decreases private sector expenditures for capital items, research and development, and employment. The government money just squeezes out private funds. They found that this happens as long as the chairman stays in place, and begins to reverse itself only when the chairmanship is lost. The recently deceased Robert Byrd is a prime example. He was famous for funneling a hugely disproportionate amount of federal funds to West Virginia for 50 years, but when was the last time you heard people rushing to set up businesses in West Virginia. Maybe now that Byrd is gone, there is hope for free enterprise in West Virginia.
Our current Administration is stacked with book-smart and degree-laden people. Unfortunately, they have very little wisdom, no personal experience creating wealth, and don’t realize that efforts such as the Stimulus Bill just deter private enterprise from reviving the economy as it has in past downturns. The solution will come when they wise up – which, admittedly, is highly unlikely – or when change is forced upon them by Republican majorities after November 3rd.
“There are many people, smart and good people, who are deeply confused about the direction of the current administration.”
They don’t know left from right? So, how are they smart?
“But They Are So Smart.”
Nah. They’re just a bunch of smart-a@@es.
IMHO
Amen. Preach it.
It really pisses college educated liberals off when I say this:
Of education, knowledge and wisdom, the greatest is wisdom and the least is education.
:)
Yeah, but did you read the next sentence were the author says that they are clueless about creating wealth and that programs like the stimulus deters plans of the private enterprise from reviving the economy as it has in the past
The administration is populated by a bunch of radical marxist academics. They’re incapable or unwilling to deal with anything outside the agenda that they’ve decided looks good on paper.
Its a little like allowing a computer to run America without inputting any data that accounts for rights, desires, or humanity.
How exactly does public sector money crowd out private expenditures? For the country as a whole, the funneling of federal funds to the states through earmarks is bad policy, but from the receiving end, I don’t see how this could hurt?
That's easy, they don't need actual applicable economic or business (read Capitalism) experience to destroy it! They only need what was instilled in them from decades of giveaways from government for no worthwhile effort, only radicalism, hatred for this country and a hell-bent-for-leather goal of destroying it so that they can remake it in their master's fashion. Make no mistakes, this is what they are about.
The ‘smart’ designation is fueled by the popular culture belief that Ivy League education = ‘smart’. It’s simplistic, and wrong.
That is very telling.
Proverbs (1:20-, 4) is full of encouragement and admonition on attaining wisdom and not rejecting it. Of course, wisdom is based on the respect/fear of God Almighty, which most of the left rejects.
It’s also a self-affirming thing in the left-handed circlejerk, that all who hold the same leftist views are smart.
It’s one of the main reasons that those who don’t have a solid relationship with who they are will become liberals, in order to have a self-affirming ideology that they are both intellectually and morally superior to others.
One of my relatives asked me once, "Why don't they just print more money?" She's not really a liberal in her thinking usually and mostly votes for republicans, she was and is simply ignorant of how things work.
I explained to her why that isn't the answer and she "got it". Sadly many people in our country are just as ignorant and they vote too.
My college roommate, we are Oklahoma State University 1973 grads, was just here. She is a San Diego California public school teacher and had just been at a national teacher convention in New Orleans. She said that the MAJORITY of teachers there do not approve of Obama. They say he LIED to them face to face at their 2008 convention. She said she will not vote for him 2012. Now I do not trust that statement 100%, but the tides are changing.
"Affirmative action" degrees. Alvin Greene has one of them.
So does Obama.
If ANYONE here has not read ATLAS SHRUGGED, it is time!
It’s not too compolicated: Those appropriated dollars are spent inefficiently, often based on political connections rather than skill or need. The more money there is, the more in the private sector “play the game” chasing it, leaving less to serve the rest of the private sector.
IOW, it’s an example of the broken window fallacy writ large.
“I am so smart, I am so smart, S-M-R-T I am so smart” ~(_8(|)
Good read, if a little long-winded at times.
It hit a little too close to the mark for me in a few places. I could read some of the exposition of the members of the "presidential administration" in the book, then watch the members of the BO regime....and overlay them completely to find a match.
A bit scary, IMHO.
Behold my tagline:
They ARE smart... the DESTRUCTION of capitalism and implementation of SOCIALISM (while soros, ironically makes a fotrune) IS THEIR PLAN!
When Obambi says “things are on the right track” he means TO SOCIALISM!!
Frightening, isn't it? That graph clearly illustrates why there's so much economic destruction being waged by the Obama regime, doesn't it?
No one in that administration has ever signed the front of a paycheck before. They have no earthly clue how free market economies such as ours operate.
I reject the actual premise. I question the actual intelligence of these people. I believe that if proof existed for their superior intelligence (such as SAT scores, etc) the mainstream media would have already published this proof. The fact that no such proof has been published (to my knowledge) indicates that these people are middle-of-the-road at best in terms of standardized test scores compared to college-degreed people nation-wide. We have seen that GWB’s SAT score was a little over 1200. The fact that Obama or his minions’ SAT’s are not widely published indicates that their scores are not much better and quite possibly lower than 1200.
It is indeed
“It is not that Liberals are stupid, far from it, it is just that they know so many things, none of which are true.” - Ronald Reagan
A handful of people will confess to knowing him at Harvard where he "earned" his law degree. But none will vouch for his ability to write or even handle his job as editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Then there is the curious case of his faculty job at the University of Chicago. This is one of the nation's premier universities outside the Ivy Leagues and the hiring of unproven professors fresh out of law school is unknown. Yet the department got a call one day from someone very high up (who is still unidentified) ordering them to make room for Obama on the faculty, a position which he promptly used as a launching pad into Illinois state politics.
Other than Obama's two (probably ghostwritten by Bill Ayers) biographies, has this guy actually written anything subject to peer review, something I had to do multiple times to earn a mere Master's Degree from a State University?
It is deliberate...They are marxists.
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