How economically illiterate -- illeconomate? -- is The Awesome One really? He professes to believe that the automation of the bank teller functions thirty-five years ago and the subsequent wide distribution of the remote banking terminals that we know today as ATMs is a cause of his term's lingering unemployment rather than a net time saver for the economy and an efficiency for everyone who needs some cash from their bank account.
Never mind that, as Robert Tracinski points out, we've had some of the best employment figures ever during those thirty-five years. Presumably, TAO also believes that broken windows are good because they make work for glaziers; that, as Keynes wrote, paying laborers with freshly printed money to dig holes and fill them up again will boost the economy; and that the water level in a pool can be lifted by taking a bucket of water from one end and dumping it in the other after sloshing some onto the pool deck along the way. Oh, wait! That was his stimulus program, so it must be true that he believes that silliness!
Tracinski's analysis is that given TAO's leftist upbringing and education
- [Obama] had to live through 25 years of ATMs and low unemployment--or, for that matter, of balanced budgets while CEOs still flitted about in untaxed corporate jets--and not let any of it register. He had to preserve a carefully maintained, earnestly burnished ignorance of the economics of a free market.
- That is the problem that keeps us mired in the Great Recession. What we are up against is not just ignorance of economics, but its cause: a moral prejudice against capitalism and moneymaking, which makes people like President Obama think that ignorance of the workings of a private economy is a virtue.
Now though, I believe our 80-year national nightmare with collectivist experimentation nears an end. There are solid reasons for my optimism.
While the teacher's unions and academia do poison the minds of the young with collectivist lies, nevertheless, the indoctrinated ones eventually leave school and go out into the world where they, for the most part, go to work every day and eventually learn the simple truth: if you produce, you have more. As our society ages, there is a greater percentage of the electorate who knows this lesson, and believes that if it is true for an individual it must also be true for a company or a nation.
Furthermore, a Tea Party sentiment is now abroad in the land. It says that we should not have helped union-work-ruled dead-heading able-bodied automobile workers to retire at age 50, bankrupting General Motors and then used freshly printed money to hand GM over to their union. It says that we shouldn't have stolen the savings of those who bought GM bonds, but rather we should have paid as much of those debts as possible from the sale of GM's assets as our bankruptcy laws required.
The Tea Party sentiment says that those who produce and save for a down payment and make their mortgage payments should not be taxed by the digital printing presses and the wild fluctuations of home prices caused by a Congress that forces banks to make loans to people for houses for which they eventually won't be able to pay. It says that those who continually borrow up to the value of their house and spend the money on frivolous things should bear the responsibility for their actions instead of those who saved for their children's college education.
The Tea Party sentiment says that we must recognize that in economics, as in all things, reality is not optional. It says that those who produce and save and provide for themselves and for the education of their children are not the problem, but rather should be protected from the depredations of those who pay no attention to that reality, and then go abroad in the land to steal using the ballot box and the tax man's authority.
As those who share that Tea Party sentiment arm themselves with the ideas of economic freedom and set out for town halls to confront their collectivist Congressional Representative, as they arm themselves with the knowledge of the electoral process and make the effort to participate, we are ever nearer collectivism's end, the day when economic freedom goes abroad in the daylight, understood and appreciated, unchallenged and admired.
