Hallucinations from Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein is out with a piece in Newsweek listing four people who Obama should bring in to the white House to help with the second half of Obama's term. The column is amusing, as when Klein says how satisfied Obama should be with his first two years. What a success!

My favorite part of Kleins musings, however, comes when he discusses bringing back Christina Romer due to her strong support for further stimulus. Klein puts it this way: "The stimulus may not poll well, but it worked. Unemployment would’ve been much higher in its absence. Was it too small? Yes, and Romer knew that at the time. She calculated that we needed $1.2 trillion. We got a bit more than half that, and then the economic crisis proved worse than we’d thought it was when Romer was running the numbers."

Let's try to translate that into English so that we can see what Klein is actually saying. First, according to Klein, the $800 billion stimulus that Obama pushed through was known by the White House to be way too small to be effective. Let's assume that Klein is correct in his comment. this leads to the question of why Obama pushed for an ineffectively small stimulus if he knew that it would not work. there was no effective Republican opposition to the stimulus; the bill was passed with essentially no Republican support. there was no opposition from Democrats to their new president; Obama could have had whatever he wanted. but Klein says that the White House knew that the stimulus needed to be almost twice as large as the one pushed through. In other words, Klein is indicting obama and his folks -- including that same Christina romer that Klein wants to bring back -- for taking an action that was too small to affect the trajectory of the economy.

Second, Klein is saying that an economist could calculate that the stimulus needed to be 1.2 trillion dollars in order to be effective. In English, this means that Klein does not understand economics or economists. Sadly, economics is not a precise science; indeed, it is more art than science. No one could calculate that 1.2 trillion dollars would succeed; there are simply too many variables that affect the economy.

Klein's statements are a manifestation of a common liberal misperception, indeed a liberal hallucination. Government "experts", even those with pedigrees from Harvard or Yale, cannot run society successfully. Using the government as an organizing force will distort the reality of the country, but it will not effectively change that reality in the way expected. Think of the messes that have hit the USA each time the liberal belief in government experts has triumphed. Remember the experts who advocated a measured escallation in the Vietnam War as opposed to the all out millitary strategy of pushing toward victory? Remember the experts who helped Jimmy Carter put the economy on the road to high inflation, slow growth and increasing unemployment? Remember the experts who advised Clinton on how to deal effectively with Muslim extremists?

The truth is that the only way that has ever worked in this country to achieve positive results is to rely on the will of the people organized through the market. Even the greatest government endeavor of modern times, the victory in World War 2, was a success that relied on the common purpose of the American people. No government expert is responsible for that success.

People like Ezra Klein must realize the fallacy of their thinking, and all americans must educate their children to this truth.