Americanly Yours

It has been common for conservatives and libertarians to criticize President Obama lately, especially for his economic policies.

The attacks from fiscal hawks (myself included) have been relentless.  But, what is becoming increasingly more common is to hear attacks on the President’s economic policies from the left.

I wrote earlier that Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticized the bailouts and argued that the type of government intervention proposed by President Obama could lower our standards of living for the next 20 years.  As I mentioned in that previous article, Joseph Stiglitz has advised both President Clinton and President Obama.  Interestingly enough, Joseph Stiglitz is a liberal who has been very critical of the free market and free market economists in the past.

Dr. Stiglitz is hardly the only liberal economist to criticize President Obama’s economic policies.  In fact, he is not even the only liberal Nobel Prize winning economist to criticize the President’s economic policies.  Recently, 2008 Nobel Prize in economics winner Paul Krugman has become a vocal critic of President Obama’s economic policies.

Paul Krugman is very much a liberal economist.  He is a strong advocate of European style “social democracy” as well as welfare programs, and the welfare state.  He even said of the welfare state:  “I was then and still am an unabashed defender of the welfare state, which I regard as the most decent social arrangement yet devised.”

I dont agree with Krugman’s proposed solution–a nationalization of the banking industry, but I do agree that Mr. Obama’s plans will hurt the economy and the country in the long run and that his plans are the wrong way to go.  Here are a few articles written by Mr. Krugman criticizing the Administration’s plans.

2/22/09

3/8/09

3/29/09

In one of my classes this semester [right before the passage of the “stimulus” bill], we had a guest speaker who was a labor economist who eventually became an Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Jimmy Carter.  This man was very critical of Reagan, Republicans, and conservatives in general.  However, he came out strongly against the “stimulus” plan.  He complained that it was very expensive, that it was spending money too slow, and that it was spending money on things that wouldnt lead to job creation or real stimulus of the economy.  A similar argument can be found in this writing by Robert Samuelson.

As I said above, you can expect conservative and libertarian economists to oppose the President’s economic plans.  However, it is somewhat disturbing when prominent (Nobel Prize) winning liberal economists begin criticizing the President’s economic policies.  Even supporter Warren Buffet has criticized the President’s plans.  These liberal critics of the President’s policies, combined with the conservative and libertarian critics leads to an important question:  are there any prominent economists who are not a part of this administration who support President Obama’s economic policies?  I have yet to hear from any.

Americanly Yours,

Phred Barnet

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I have written about Dr. Thomas Sowell here before.  I think he is possibly the smartest man in the country.  I scoured the interweb and found a bunch of great quotes from him.  Enjoy.

“People who talk incessantly about “change” are often dogmatically set in their ways.  They want to change other people.”

“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.  In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation.  The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

“The next time some academics tell you how important ‘diversity’ is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.  The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

“Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.”

“A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was.   In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.”

“No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what would you replace it with?”  When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”

“Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender and ethnicity cannot be considered within it.“

“Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”

“If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilization, then be prepared to accept barbarism.”

“If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”

“It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”

“Liberals seem to assume that, if you don’t believe in their particular political solutions, then you don’t really care about the people that they claim to want to help.”

“Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.”

“Mystical references to society and its programs to help may warm the hearts of the gullible but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats.”

“Prices are important not because money is considered paramount but because prices are a fast and effective conveyor of information through a vast society in which fragmented knowledge must be coordinated.”

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

“Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.”

“The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best.”

“The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work.   Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

“The real goal should be reduced government spending, rather than balanced budgets achieved by ever rising tax rates to cover ever rising spending.”

“Too much of what is called “education” is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.”

“What ‘multiculturalism’ boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture – and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.”

“Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow?  If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?”

“The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer’s money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse.   The black family- which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions- began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to “help.””

“Most people who read “The Communist Manifesto” probably have no idea that it was written by a couple of young men who had never worked a day in their lives, and who nevertheless spoke boldly in the name of “the workers”.”

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on “income distribution,” the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” [bureaucrats]

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it.  When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

Americanly Yours,

Phred Barnet

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