John Tamny: Two Great Pieces In Three Days

MORE STUNNING GOOD NEWS

FIRST: THE END OF AMERICAN-AS-WE-KNOW-IT--ALARMISM IS ANOTHER VARIANT OF MAN-MADE GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM. AND NEITHER IS TRUE.

I wholeheartedly agree. The good news goes something like this:

As hopeless as Obama's presidency has been, all the talk suggesting his re-election promises irrevocable damage to the United States is as arrogant as the alleged science that says we humans are destroying the earth. The earth will thrive well after all of us, and the U.S.'s culture of success will live and thrive whether Obama is a one or two-term President....

Obama believes we’re made better off economically when the most productive around us have their wealth redistributed away from them, he believes a cheap dollar that erodes our savings/paychecks in concert with reducing company-creating investment is a positive, and perhaps scariest of all, he believes that productivity (think computers, factory automation) is the source of our nosebleed levels of unemployment. Obama is an embarrassment (as was his dollar-cheapening, bailout loving predecessor in the White House) to this great nation, and simple American pride should make us desirous of putting him on the speaker’s circuit of failed presidents beginning in 2013...

Did Obama sign with great gusto a law that turned U.S. CEOs into accountants in the form of Sarbanes-Oxley? No, that was George W. Bush. Did he set capitalism back through the bailing out of banks and car companies? To some degree he did, but the aforementioned economic horrors similarly began under Bush. What about the dollar? In that case both Bush and Obama pursued policies that succeeded in collapsing the most important price (the dollar) in the world. That Obama passed a ghastly health care bill hardly recommends him, but legal realities of the Supreme Court kind mean he may see his signal legislative “achievement” go up in smoke....

A very successful Houston entrepreneur whose businesses have grown gangbusters throughout Obama’s presidency told me over a year ago that “I’m way too smart and hardworking for Obama. Nothing he does will keep me down.” Amen to that, and if our American sense of self has declined so much that we can’t outthink Obama, maybe it’s something other than Obama that explains our depressed state at the moment. If Obama is so pathetic as so many suggest, aren’t we even more pathetic for blaming him for all of our woes?

Yes, policy is bad, and the policies foisted on us by Bush and Obama surely weigh on growth. But for Americans to believe that the moment we’re in and the election we’re about to vote in will decide the future of the United States is the height of delusion.


Read it all and take heart at Forbes.com.

SECOND, TAMNY WRITES ABOUT HOW THE 'ECONOMIC DOCTOR' BEN BERNENKE IS KILLING THE U.S. ECONOMY PATIENT with far too much of his own prescribed medicine---medicine that's digging us deeper and deeper into the pit that we're trying to get out of. To wit:

I'm telling you that the cure is the disease. The main source of illness in this world is the doctor's own illness: his compulsion to try and cure and his fraudulent belief that he can. It ain't easy to do nothing, now that society is telling everyone that the body is fundamentally flawed and about to self-destruct." The Fat Man, The House of God, by Samuel Shem, p. 215

When doctors are asked what novel best describes what it's like to work in a hospital, Samuel Shem's 1978 classic, The House of God, is frequently the answer offered up. Though television dramas of the medical variety have historically glamorized the profession, up close the picture is often a gruesome one as the novel reveals.

A regular theme in the book is one of doctors, bursting with knowledge learned at the best medical schools, killing their patients given their hubristic desire to "do something" when their patients are sick. The Fat Man in the story, who is quoted above, did no such thing.

As he explained to intern Roy Basch, "My outpatients. I do nothing medical for them, and they love me. You know how much booze, hot merchandize, and food there's gonna be in that crowd as Hannukah and Christmas presents for me? And all because I don't do a goddamn medical thing." The Fat Man understood what interns fresh out of medical school hadn't quite figured out, that the body itself is often the best healer, so better it is in many instances to do no harm by virtue of letting the illness run its course.

The members of the Federal Reserve Board led by a doctor of different stripes, Ben Bernanke, could learn more from House of God than all the economics books they devour on the way to grandiose visions of fixing what ails us economically. Overcome with similar hubris that causes arrogant medical professionals to kill patients, the Bernanke Fed is foisting myriad fixes on the economy learned in textbooks, and in the process is strangling it.


Great thinking--- well worth reading and pondering it all.