Beating Back Obamanomics
Mises Daily by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. | Posted on 3/6/2009 12:00:00 AM
It's raining, pouring, economic fallacies by the hour, followed by a flood of horrible policy that is driving us ever further into economic depression. The regime in charge has really gone nuts, revealing itself as both deeply ignorant and horribly evil.
We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles heel of the left wing: its abysmal ignorance of economic science. The ideological tendency has gone from Keynesianism to outright socialism in a matter of a few weeks.
And the trajectory seems to be accelerated mainly by the logic of the interventionist cycle: bad policy leads to bad results that are addressed through bad policy, and so on, straight down the fast track to serfdom. Obama's attachment to "transparency" — the buzzword of the day — allows all intelligent people to observe the sickening sight in real time, and to the cheers of the kept class of intellectual phonies like Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman.
The encouraging thing — and perhaps this too was inevitable — is that the right wing is getting its act together. It has suddenly discovered that economics matters. You can cheer on the hot wars, fight the culture wars, and crack down on political dissidents all you want. But in the end, what makes for the good society is a sound economy. Without it, all the rest falls apart.
Thus all our favorite conservatives are starting to make sense. The American Spectator is alarmed. Rush Limbaugh sounds like LRC. The American Conservative has temporarily dropped its love of protectionism to warn of dollar inflation. The love of war has gone AWOL at National Review. The Heritage Foundation is warning that government spending and taxation are driving us to ruin. Pat Buchanan is defending the free market!
Where were these people during the last eight years of Bush's misrule? Asleep or seeking preferment or something. It's not as if Obama caused this crisis; he is only making it worse. In any case, the Right has begun to turn to the side of truth and justice, precisely as they did during Clinton's rule, and this is all to the good, in general.
But just in case we are observing yet another expedient shift, it might be a good idea to understand precisely why socialism is a bad idea. The Obama administration doesn't seem to get it. And there is plenty to get. Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration.
People have made those points for hundreds of years. Somehow, and for whatever reason, many people rejected these critics. No, they said, all of this sounds plausible, but you don't understand how the sheer glory of the socialist ideal, with perfect equality and social justice, will bring about a new sense of things. Mankind will be inspired to share, create, work, and obey by the astonishing emergence of a completely new form of social organization.
AI
