Category Archives: Barack Obama

Voodoo Child Talks Up A Storm

Barack Obama, Economy, Political Economy, Republicans, Socialism

The excerpt is from my new WND.com column, “Voodoo Child Talks Up A Storm”:

“Because consumption is its be-all and end-all, consumer confidence is crucial to the Cult of Keynes. If the consumer is not crazy confident—even when he ought not to be—goes the ‘thinking,’ he’ll quit consuming until he drops”:

“We will act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times,’ barked Barack. ‘This administration is moving swiftly and aggressively to break this destructive cycle, restore confidence, and re-start lending.'”

“Our economic animists are hoping that the holy spirit of ‘confidence’ will enter the once bitten, twice shy lender, and make him lend. The same spell is supposed to mysteriously move the unemployed and penniless to spend.”

“In his wonderfully learned book, The Failure of the ‘New Economics,’ Henry Hazlitt (a favorite of mine, as you might have guessed) summed-up the essence of Keynes’ “General Theory”:

“The great virtue is Consumption, extravagance, improvidence. The great vice is Saving, thrift, ‘financial prudence.'” …

Read why the “Voodoo Child is true to the mores and methodology of Keynes,” in “Voodoo Child Talks Up A Storm,” now on WND.com.

The Burden Of Barack

Barack Obama, Economy, Ethics, Morality

Tom Knapp @ the Knappster, protests our parasitical prince’s hypocrisy. However, Tom would have done well to make a less egalitarian assessment of Barack’s burden on his “company’s 300 million ‘investors.'” Most Americans are tax consumers. The few taxpayers will be forking-out for The Man:

“I watched the president’s speech last night. … He got in a good zinger about those CEOs and their private jets. For some reason, he decided to hold off on announcing that he’ll be giving up his personal jet — you know, the one he used last week when he flew all the way to Denver to sign a bill he could just as easily have signed on the top of Teddy Roosevelt’s old desk in the Oval Office.”

“Make no mistake here: Barack Obama is a CEO, just like the ones he’s chewing out.”

“Among the perks he gets as CEO of the US government — perks he’s evinced no intention of giving up to set the example for those he’s scolding — are a $400k annual salary, free residence in a palatial home (complete with groundskeepers, cooks, doormen, etc.), a 24/7 personal security detail, transportation to wherever he desires via limousine, helicopter or personal jet, and a “golden parachute,” which includes a pension of nearly $200k per year for life, continuation of that security detail (and the costs of any accommodations required for it to fit into his lifestyle), and his own library.”

“What do we get for the millions of dollars we annually lavish on our golden boy CEO? A definition of ‘fiscal responsibility’ that comes to a $1,600+ annual loss for each and every one of his company’s 300 million ‘investors.’ This, from the guy who assures us that he’s the one who can ‘fix’ the economy. Jee. Zuz.”

Economic Animism

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Economy, Neoconservatism, Political Economy, Propaganda, Republicans

Republikeynesians, especially, have been demanding that in his first address to a joint session of Congress, Obama “talk up” the economy. “What Obama Should Do,” blared the typical headline in the neoconservative National Review. And the answers: “Be positive, if prudent,” instructed Bill O’Reilly. “Restore economic confidence,” advised Conrad Black, a conservative who also believes that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the champion of freedom. (Black, who, incongruously, combines a call for serious central planning with a condemnation of it, has, seemingly, learned nothing from falling prey to the same predators.)

This tired battle cry just goes to show the depths of this lot’s economic “thinking.”

Most Republicans have taken up economist John Maynard Keynes’ kooky concept of “animal spirits.” This was Keynes’ condescending reference to consumer confidence. Keynes believed that the fickle consumer’s biorhythms controlled the economy (I kid you not). Which explains why confused Republicans, like Democrats, keep kibitzing about “a crisis in consumer confidence.”

The implication being that “confidence” will galvanize the jobless and the penniless to spend.

I sincerely hope not.

By the way, the Voodoo Child has obliged. This is the first line in Obama’s pie-in-the-sky speech:

“[T]onight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before.”

Updated: Rest Assured; George Clooney Is On Board

Africa, Barack Obama, Celebrity, Constitution, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Political Correctness

What a relief. Yet another philosopher king, this time Clueless Clooney, has been recruited to steer the proverbial Ship of State to safety. The President and Vice President want you to know, as they “assured the actor and activist George Clooney last night,” that

“Bringing relief to the battered region of Darfur is a top priority for the administration.”

By breaking bread with Clooney, the “prudential” Obama-Biden pair is doing nothing Bush had not done before them. Or the Clintons, for that matter. Bush went from preaching “trade not aid,” and being charmingly unaware of celebrity, to instituting trade tariffs, and pledging to Bono a 50 percent increase in U.S. foreign aid over three years.

Expect an American nation-building “expedition” to Darfur, which will be greeted approvingly by the neoconnery and others on the left.

For those of you wishing to be reminded, if only out of nostalgia, of the constitutional position on foreign aid, the late Lord Peter Bauer had this to say about the “morality” of “taxpayer’s money compulsorily collected”:

“Contributors not only have no choice but quite generally do not even know they are contributing. It is sometimes urged that in a democracy taxpayers do have a choice, which restores the moral element to foreign aid. This objection is superficial. The taxpayer has to contribute to foreign aid whether he likes it or not and whether he has voted in its favor or against it.”

Update: Western economists like the great Peter Bauer, the foremost authority on development, had been condemning aid to Third World countries for decades. But in the PC order, it is only when an African reaches the same, derivative deduction that the case against foreign aid is given credence by liberals.