President Obama will address the State of the Union, today, speaking before Congress. These annual efforts are almost uniformly unbearable, with too much applause and too much rah-rah-boy politicking. And far too little thought.
Scuttlebutt has it that the president will concentrate on the economy, on “jobs.”
After the sea change of the last election, one might hope that he’d stay on topic and address constitutionally-mandated issues of his office.
“Jobs” are none of his business. “Jobs” — by which I mean the number of people employed this way or that out there in the non-governmental sector, and by which he means the number of jobs total, including those paid for out of taxpayer expense — should not be his chief worry.
No president in recent memory has excelled by fiddling with policy to micromanage “the economy.” No one knows this stuff. Not even college professors specializing in macroeconomics.
What government operatives know is how to get elected, stay in office. How to preen for television cameras, read a prompter.
You know, the essentials.
But they cannot possibly know enough to “run the economy.”
And yet, Obama talks about making the country “more competitive.” Oh, come on. Just open up trade — which promotes widespread co-operation as well as competition — stop micromanaging the money supply through the Fed, make regulations fit a rule of law and not a vast bureaucratic command system, and let it go. Let individuals and businesses worry about “competiveness.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Not His Job”
Fantastic!! Hear Hear!! Did you send to Prezbo himself by any chance? He needs to see this about 50 million times!! ANd so do those idiots Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Neither of them heard the sea change in November.
Thanks for your common sense!
excerpts from “The Pretence of Knowledge”-by Friedrich A. Hayek_ his acceptance speech for the 1974 Nobel in economics.
“Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.”
“And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement.”
“We know, of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.”
“..the superstition that only measurable magnitudes can be important has done positive harm..”
“The conflict between what in its present mood the public expects science to achieve in satisfaction of popular hopes and what is really in its power is a serious matter because, even if the true scientists should all recognize the limitations of what they can do in the field of human affairs, so long as the public expects more there will always be some who will pretend, and perhaps honestly believe, that they can do more to meet popular demands than is really in their power. It is often difficult enough for the expert, and certainly in many instances impossible for the layman, to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate claims advanced in the name of science. ”
“As we advance, we find more and more frequently that we can in fact ascertain only some but not all the particular circumstances which determine the outcome of a given process; and in consequence we are able to predict only some but not all the properties of the result we have to expect. ”
“To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”
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These experts are no better than Kipling’s monkey tribe, the Bandar-log, who said, “we all say it so it must be so.” Did you know that Lincoln was not killed by John Wilkes Booth? He was severely wounded, but would have survived crippled. He was killed by the ministrations of the experts of the day, the doctors that treated him. They dutifully recorded the attempts at care that they gave. A review by a competent ER doc said it was clear that these attempts to treat caused his death.
The folks running our economy and health care system are no better than Lincoln’s doctors and are killing our republic.
http://dissembler.blogtownhall.com
It’s always a pleasure to hear from someone with epxeritse.