Liberal professor identifies the problem

Anyone who doesn't understand how we have arrived at the state we are in and why we have the political leadership we now have, has only to read this mea culpa of a liberal psychology professor from Emory University.  This garden variety liberal lays all the blame for our current "predicament" on all the usual left wing demons: Wall Street, greed, lack of regulations, tax breaks for the wealthy, Republicans.   And yet, in retrospect, the professor now realizes that Obama had a resume that didn't demonstrate many leadership qualities.   But nowhere in this rant does the professor explain the world view that led him and his friends to elect Barack Obama in the first place.  Had he been minimally introspective,  he just might have questioned why he and his friends bought into the hopey-dopey mantra of an obvious (at least to many of us) fraud in the first place.  Had he done so it might have come down to this:  The professor and his like-minded friends have a view of human nature that doesn't comport with reality.  They are looking for the chimera of the perfectibility of man.  All it takes in this world is the single perfect leader who understands -- like they do -- how to correct the flaws in the system and human nature, that once corrected will result in the perfect society.  The vague, unspecific and dreamy solutions of a messiah -- The One -- were enough for these dreamers to elect an Obama.  Herein lies the reason dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Kim Jong II, rise to power.  They are enabled by dreamers looking for the perfect world.

ADDED:  This article catalogues the case for arguing Obama is an out and out Marxist who is carefully orchestrating the demise of the US in order to create a new world order out of the rubble.  It often seems that what he does is so demonstrably counterproductive that there must be some nefarious reason for it.  If one thinks about the Obama constituencies in the context of some nefarious master plan, that plan becomes a plausibility.  O's primary constituency is the SEIU and sister unions (AFL-CIO, et al) and the blacks.  Does anyone doubt that this constituency would not prefer a reordering of society in which what the rich and productive people have is spread among them?

FDR's depression

Most people are not aware that the Great Depression started with the stock market collapse in 1929, shortly after Herbert Hoover was elected president.  Hoover, a technocrat/businessman, began a series of make work and other government spending programs that FDR expanded upon once he became president in 1933.  Many of the New Deal programs were simply variations and amplifications of the Hoover Administration's attempt to create jobs with government projects and planning.  Walter Williams, a conservative economist, talks about the evolution and failure of some of these programs in this column here.  It's worth noting that there was at least as much unemployment, north of 20%, in 1939/40 as in 1931/33 long after the programs of Hoover and FDR were put into play.  Clearly they had no impact on the unemployment rate.  So why are so many keen on the leadership of FDR during this period?  Maybe because he introduced many programs that have come to be known as the social safety net the runaway costs of which have now driven us into bankruptcy.  Those who believe in a government directed economy that delivers the fruits of everyone's labors evenly are always keen on more and more government programs and regulations to effect this end.  Hoover and FDR started the ball rolling and their big government followers remain grateful to these two.

Who is this guy, anyway?

Naorman Podhoretz has "nailed" Obama in this column and revealed the fecklessness and venality of the liberal crowd who anointed and engineered his election to the presidency of the United States.  What's curious is that now that liberals are turning on him they are revealing for all those who didn't see it before the emptiness and wrong-headedness of their world view, if one can call it a "view".  It's really more like nihilism than socialism, or communism or even fascism.  Since all these other statist "isms" have been tried on large and small scales and failed repeatedly the liberals behind Obama really just wanted power.  Now that they have had that power and nothing positive has come of it, because it cannot,  the radical lefties have turned on their putative leader and are second guessing him and each other.  Good.  They deserve each other.  The rest of us who saw through this fake did not deserve him but we have him until at least 2012.

ADDED:  In a few paragraphs, Rex Murphy lays the blame for this tragic mistake precisely where it belongs.

Government Amateurs vs Government Professionals

The real problem with government spending, taxes, and the like is exposed in this post linked below.  In short, the premise of the argument is that government is an industry and those who work in this industry act and react just like workers in any other industry, say automotive, entertainment, medicine, advertising, publishing, energy, et.al.  An additional personal observation unremarked upon in this post, is the affinity liberals and democrats have for government and government work.  This affinity is one reason the vast majority of government employees are democrats and vote heavily democrat at election time.  Obviously these workers are voting for the policies that grow and expand the size of government, their industry, and mostly these programs are proposed by liberals and democrats.  Since between one in five and one in six employees in the workforce work for the government at all levels (state, local and federal) the democrats have a solid constituency for their programs ready-to-go at election time.  It's hard to see how the republicans can overcome this disadvantage.

Government Amateurs vs Government Professionals

The deconstruction of Obama

James Lewis's deconstruction of Obama here says everything about the guy that can and needs to be said.  After this no other analysis of this pitiable, pitiful excuse for a leader, is necessary.  The country is in for a rough ride until the One goes back to wherever he came from in the first place.

Never, ever, ever trust a liberal

Scott Johnson of Powerline underlines and confirms a belief many conservatives have about liberals, at least most liberals.  They dissemble constantly and think nothing of it.  To a liberal lying is a perfectly acceptable strategy in order to further any cause they espouse, which usually starts with enlarging the size and scope of government through dependency programs they propose and get passed by their counterparts in the government.  After all administering some government handout program sure beats subjecting oneself to the vagaries of free market enterprises where one has to actually provide a product or service that someone else is willing to pay money for.  Furthermore the jobs liberals want typically don't ever go away and thus represent security not available to one making an honest living in the private sector.  It behooves everyone to read this post by Johnson to understand the venality of most liberals.  The lesson here:  do not trust a liberal anymore than you would trust a Muslim who practices Taqiya (defined as the practice of acceptable and permissible lying by Muslims to further the cause of Islam when dealing with infidels), or a communist who lies and dissembles with impunity in the furtherance of his evil cause.  In short, liberals are simply western political versions of Islamists and communists and should be recognized as such by the rest of us.  Elizabeth Warren, the subject of Johnson's post, is the Harvard law professor appointed by Obama to create the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now operative.  Ms Warren,  like Obama a doctrinaire liberal, was not confirmed by Congress to run this abomination she created, but the dirty work has been done, the CFPB is now up and running with a new head, and Warren is back in her lair at Harvard where she can continue to make intellectual mischief.  Workers in the financial services industry need to rise up against the Warrens of academia or there may come a day when they will be involuntarily working for the government.

Corruption

Want to know how to spell crony as in crony capitalism?  Try C-H-R-Y-S-L-E-R.  See here.

While on the subject of corruption  this story about the Solyndra company tells us all the rest we need to know about any administration's ability to pick winners and commit taxpayer money to politically motivated decisions.  This is called crony-capitalism and never works because politically driven decisions, lacking the scrutiny of those who have their own skin in the game, are inherently flawed.  Capitalism works because those investing capital in companies scrupulously apply due diligence.  Rule number one for these investors is never completely trust the word or projection of those seeking your capital because they have a built-in bias for the investment.  The prudent investor conducts his own independent research and due diligence, looking for corroborating sources of information before making a commitment to invest.  Contrast this approach to that of the government representative Henry Waxman who was completely taken by surprise by the failure of Solyndra after being assured by the COO two months before the company filed for bankruptcy that its financial condition was excellent.  Clearly Henry Waxman was a lot less careful investing taxpayers money than he would have been his own largely because he was applying political criteria to the success of the investment.  Lesson?  Keep politicians and the government out of business of picking winners and losers in the marketplace.