Cowboy Confessional

Barack Obama is a discount FDR, and Roosevelt was no prize to begin with.

Many men mistreat their women by trying to fix whatever problems they have, whereas women generally prefer that men listen, then fix problems on their own terms. Such is the nature of The People and government, where certain elected footmen mistakenly take it upon themselves to spot-fix every societal woe in an attempt to create happier homes, which leads to an unhappy abode and eventual divorce. Politicians also believe that government policy, applied by allegedly intelligent beltway denizen, makes smarter decisions than the daily transactional havoc committed by millions of hoi polloi.

Barack Obama and FDR, flying by their britches bottoms, attempted to fix economies and failed, leaving a frustrated populace drafting separation papers.

The common thread within the Great Depression and the Great Recession is uncertainty. Since everyone shops, saves and invests at different levels depending on their means and personal objectives, no central planning can ever stimulate everybody. FDR, in an unpatriotic attempt to restructure America without constitutional approval, assigned armies of analyst in the Nation Recovery Administration (unaffectionately referred to as Nuts Running America) to fix prices, set wages, engineer corporate collusion, reduce farm crops, add new employment taxes and generally keep The People in a dazed state of uncertainty. With uncertainly amplified via every new government initiative and stranglehold on economic activity, businesses and individuals decided to avoid shopping, saving and investing. The resulting double-dip depression and persistent high unemployment were quite uniquely FDR’s/Obama’s doing because they inserted uncertainty suppositories into America’s economic rectum.

John Stossel reports that Obama is oafishly echoing FDR.

In an Op/Ed of interest, Stossel reports on a set of CEOs who head organizations as small as a chain of diners, to the chief of the largest consumer electronics retailer, and to a captain of the banking industry. Each exec echoes that Obamacare alone is keeping them from hiring new people. Aside from over 1,000 pages of arcane falderal, the legislation leaves many yet unmade decisions to the secretary of health and human services (whoever that will be next week). The CEOs say that they have no idea what hiring employees will cost in the future, and thus are hiring nobody until there is some clarity.

Don’t hold your breath boys. This administration never provides clarity.

Uncertainty’s definition includes the concepts of unpredictability, indeterminacy and indefiniteness. When deciding one’s own direction, self-doubt pales in comparison to the unknown. The darker the woods, the less likely one will enter lest they be eaten alive. American business and the unemployed have few doubts about what they want to do, namely hire and be hired. External unpredictability creates hesitation. Nobody in America dares make an economic move until surer footing is available, and as long as Obama continues economic meddling – everything from “stimulus” shush funds to Solydra-style crony capitalism – anybody with multiple functioning dyndra won’t dare dive deep into our darkening economic ocean.

Yet there is hope, though it be the false flavor.

Many people sentimentally attached to their ideological alignment say that FDR offered “hope.” This vague notion, uttered by vague-minded people, expresses the dream that some semi-divine being is manipulating the levers of fate to produce better times. After all, as I concluded in Afterlife, “Hope is what gives us the very reason to live.” Yet hope is not action, and until there is action by all individuals to move in their desired directions, then hope is all they have.

This is why Obama ran under banners peddling hope. It is an easy sell to the weak minded.

Obama’s actions are the only thing worse than his empty hope. His “shovel-ready” jobs program – disgusting in his elitist notion that everyone outside of the White House turns shovels for a living – violated the single most important principle in macro-economic revival, that all participants in the economy receive relief and then be left to decide how to improve their condition. Thus his jobs “plan” produced so few jobs, and in such segregated industries and geographies, that his promise of keeping unemployment under 8% is an utter failure (official unemployment went higher than 10%, still hovers near 9%, and if we include people who gave up or are seriously under-employed, the unemployment rate is about 22%). And Obama economic growth is abysmal.

Certainty is never absolute, but it is always personal. Had Obama anything resembling wisdom, his objectives would have included stabilizing the financial sector, then clearing away brush in front of those who create jobs. Instead he launched serial gimmicks and arranged ideological schemes that produced nothing, leaving everyone to wonder what the state of the economy really was. Obamacare added to the brush and erected blockades against hiring, the seeds of economic revival. People can plan in a market economy, but not a political one. Barack has done the opposite of what is essential to initiate economic wellness.

You could put everything Barack Obama knows about macro economics into a thimble and still have room for Mitt Romney’s policy consistency.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 at 6:00 am and is filed under Economics, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.