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Carter Country

Back during his presidential campaign, I wrote that Obama was Jimmy Carter with a tan. Such rhetorical Visigothery, at the time, made me unpopular with those who saw nothing but the crease in Obama’s pants and hadn’t yet realized the measures he’d gone to to hide Brother Billy in a Boston tenement. But the times, they are a changing:

U-6 unemployment rose again to 15.9 percent, a total of 24.39 million people who want full-time work and can’t find it. That number in particular is why Obama will be in big trouble come 2012, because it’s one that is not likely to decrease significantly between now and next year, when folks will be making up their minds.

The fact is, $2.4 trillion of government “stimulus” later, if the recession had simply been allowed to run its course to begin with, the economy would have naturally found its bottom, and resources would have necessarily been reallocated out of the public sector with greater speed. We’d already be in recovery.

The Keynesian “stimulus” that was pursued was a very specific set of policies around a theoretical framework. If borrowing, printing, and spending trillions of dollars were a valid theory to prosperity, then it should have worked — Obama got everything he wanted.

Sadly, it did not work. The economy is in troubled waters, and slow growth, Jimmy Carter-like stagflation is once again here. Until the government gets its spending under control, and removes unnecessary obstacles to capital formation, it will be impossible to conclude that Obama “stimulus” has been anything but a complete failure.

It’s déjà vu all over again.

The key to any successful Republican run at the presidency need start and end with precisely this point: Obama and a Dem supermajority got everything they wanted to “fix” the economy. It didn’t work. And that’s because, on a fundamental level, those policies are flawed and lead to exactly what we’re seeing today.

We need the Dems to balance GOP overreach, the message should be. But only if both sides start from the basic premise that the capitalist system and free markets — not centralized tyranny, cronyism, and a command-and-control economy run largely by presidential directives filtered through unelected bureaucrats — are the building blocks of liberty and prosperity.

Just as our founding documents posited.

Sometimes, old dead white guys can be smart, too.

10 Replies to “Carter Country”

  1. Blake says:

    I’m constantly amazed at how little the credentialed elite know or understand about history.

  2. Ernst Schreiber says:

    Okay, stupid question: what’s this “rhetorical Visigothery” stuff?

    I freely admit it’s my own fault for not knowing, having been away from the computer all weekend. But it was above 70 degrees! Two days in row! That hasn’t happened in these here parts in like six or seven months!

  3. LTC John says:

    Blake, they may know it, but they cast it aside as either an obstacle to their goals, or (if a true believer) it was just the actions of a bunch of womyn-hating, racist, slave-owning, genocidal imperialst white guys.

  4. Slartibartfast says:

    Here ya go, Ernst:

    I have given up my one man quest to protect the English language from right wing Visigoths who insist in raping, pillaging, and burning their way through the dictionary – corrupting definitions and creating havoc with meaning while doing their utmost to make intelligent discourse impossible.

    Not raping raping, understand.

  5. JimK says:

    I think there is really only one candidate-to-be who has hammered on this central issue more than any other. Get the government out of the way is the message. A lot of us are simply sitting on our hands until she announces.

  6. little the credentialed elite know or understand about history

    They know that the credential allows them to decide what version of history the rest of us should understand.

  7. Abe Froman says:

    A lot of us are simply sitting on our hands until she announces.

    And others are praying like hell that she doesn’t. So, good luck finding someone who pleases everybody.

  8. Blake says:

    I tend toward elites believing “things are different this time.”

    Imagine the Credentialed Elites™ as Peter Gibbons:

    Peter Gibbons: [Explaining the plan] Alright so when the sub routine compounds the interest is uses all these extra decimal places that just get rounded off. So we simplified the whole thing, we rounded them all down, drop the remainder into an account we opened.
    Joanna: [Confused] So you’re stealing?
    Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don’t understand. It’s very complicated. It’s uh it’s aggregate, so I’m talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
    Joanna: Oh okay. So you’re gonna be making a lot of money, right?
    Peter Gibbons: Yeah.
    Joanna: Right. It’s not yours?
    Peter Gibbons: Well it becomes ours.
    Joanna: How is that not stealing?
    Peter Gibbons: [pauses] I don’t think I’m explaining this very well.
    Joanna: Okay.

  9. ProfShade says:

    Even old, dead white guys like Walter Brennan have a leg up on the ass clowns running right now.

  10. Bob Reed says:

    Message?

    It’s the economy, Stupid!

    Duh, Winning!

    Jeff’s suggestion should be the simplistic message for the campaign. The Democrats got everything they want, and it didn’t work because it never has and never will

    That’s why we need to go back to free and open markets.

Comments are closed.