President Obama recently announced that he was consulting with “experts” on the economy. One has to wonder where these experts have been for the past 200 years. It’s not as though any of the economic problems confronting our country are new.
The fact is every “expert” in the world knows how to grow an economy and how to generate wealth. What they haven’t figured out is how to grow an economy and still attain power for those whom they are trying to appease. That’s the dilemma that keeps the conversation going.
Many people want to believe the intentions of leadership are good. They want to believe that if it becomes apparent that the citizenry will fare better if the leaders step back from their egos, then the leaders will do so. That is hardly ever the case. George Washington was able to step back from the lure of great power, but not many have been so noted since.
But since most people want to believe the best of their leadership, they willingly and mistakenly conclude that this thing called “economy,” must be a very complicated thing, indeed, to so befuddle all the great minds. To them it is every bit as reassuring as President Obama intends, to hear that he is consulting with “experts.”
Most people find it hard to believe that given its lead, the market will always quickly adjusted itself – dispatching with little fanfare those who have caused the problems. Despite daily and dramatic evidence of its efficiencies, most people do not appreciate the lightening speed of markets. So quickly, in fact, do markets respond, that this recession would have been largely history, even before Obama took the oath of office, if the power seekers hadn’t been so determined to cling to their power, wielding a mystic kind of belief about being “too big to fail.”
Not adverse to such power himself, Obama still struggles to squeeze tightly to that power while trying to grab even more. So when he says he’s talking to the “experts” that is what he is hoping they can tell him how to do, while we hang on by our fingernails – not unlike the millions, throughout history, who have been sacrificed before.
I don’t doubt that there have been those who sincerely believed that there must be a way to achieve both, a dynamic economy and power. They probably believed that people just hadn’t been smart enough to figure it out, and that they would. But, they too were willing to sacrifice the lives and happiness of what ever untold millions, it took, while they pursued their arrogant quest.
What they seem unable to accept is that it is a law of nature – as implacable as the force of gravity – that human beings produce best and are most creative only when they are free to make choices and are not intimidated by threats of force. Obviously such an environment does not tolerate well, the existence of mountains of regulations, licensing, permitting, confiscatory taxes, mandates, official standards, centralized planning, czars, bureaucracies, armies, and state police.
Be assured though that all of President Obama’s experts are expert enough to know. Be assured that they know how to create jobs, how to increase wealth, and how to end this recession. The problem is, that is not their priority.
