I spent the majority of my day driving, either from one town to the next or from store to store. During my initial hour long commute to Consumerville, aka St. Joseph, Missouri, I heard Rush Limbaugh’s first hour, detailing how the media had fawned over the intellect of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Listen to this media montage.
MEADE: Smart and ruthless.
WILLIAMS: Diplomats who dealt with him describe Kim as shrewd and calculating.
SCARBOROUGH: In a demented sort of way, brilliant.
HAAS: Tactically brilliant.
RADCHENKO: A very cunning person and very smart person.
MITCHELL: Was profoundly important around the world. I actually met him when I traveled there with Madeleine Albright.
Brilliant!
Very smart!
Profoundly important around the world.
Sounds like someone else I have heard of.
Here’s how someone the modern liberal media considers brilliant handled the economy:
During the early 1970s, North Korea’s economy stagnated, with GDP per capita flatlining until Kim Il Sung’s death. Then, in 1994, after Kim Jong Il took over, the economy started shrinking noticeably, per capita incomes fell, and the country became dependent on emergency U.N. food aid to stave off famines that had already killed as many as 3 million people. North Korea became, as Eberstadt puts it, “the world’s first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.”
Behold the wonders of centrally planned economies!
Now, let’s compare that to the successes of our Dear Leader, the man the same media said had an IQ that was off the charts:
It’s reasonable to assume that Mr. Obama will face re-election with the highest unemployment rate of any post-war president. If the current rate of hiring continues, under Mr. Obama’s stewardship the nation will have actually lost jobs, a stunning achievement in its own way. Indeed, Obama is now on track to have the worst jobs record of any president in the modern era. The unemployment rate will be significantly higher than when he took office. Chronic unemployment is worse than it was during the Great Depression. And during the Obama presidency the United States saw its bond rating downgraded for the first time in history.
There’s more.
Mr. Obama will have shattered all the records when it comes to the deficit and the debt. For example, under Obama the budget deficit and federal debt have reached their highest percentage since World War II. The same is true when it comes to federal spending as a percentage of GDP. During the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the median annual household income fell by 6.7 percent – a more substantial decline than occurred during the Great Recession. The Christian Science Monitor points out, “The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the U.S. government began recording it five decades ago.” The housing crisis is worse than the Great Depression. Home values worth one-third less than they were five years ago. The home ownership rate is the lowest since 1965. The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty has seen a record increase on President Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. And government dependency, defined as the percentage of persons receiving one or more federal benefit payments, is the highest in American history.
Speaking of government dependency:
But, he’s brilliant! Very smart!
How can two people with near god-like intellect both embrace the same failed economic policies and try to implement them, especially considering the mountains of evidence showing how they will only lead to economic ruination?
If these two giants of reason can’t get this political philosophy to work, can anyone?
I’m guessing not. The whole system should be shelved.
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Yeah, communism is one of those things that humanity has to experience failure multiple times to let go of. It’s like the first girl you fall in love with…if she doesn’t love you back, it’s never a no, it’s try harder. But it’s on a societal scale not an individual one. The end result of the realization that Communism doesn’t work is either the path that China took, which is going from a super-ideological government to a super-practical one, or the ones that North Korea, USSR, and Cuba took, which is get stuck in their own universe where cultural pride, a sense of uniqueness and collective unity, and endless reminiscing about the glory of the revolution form a surrogate worldview that takes their minds off the undeniable evidence that their system, one that places materialism and economics at the center stage, cannot in reality produce enough material goods.
You’re right in that not even geniuses can run a pure Marxist economy well enough to keep apace with free market capitalism. Kim, Castro, Stalin, Mao, etc. thought they could. But it’s evident that while Communism might get you somewhere in the short run, over a couple decades or so, Communism flatlines whereas capitalism continues to grow year after year. A depression in capitalism means slowed growth for the next decade at most, and a high probability of a recovery that makes up the lost difference so that the long-term growth trend is hardly even affected, but a stagnation in socialism means that continuing the same policy will lead to what North Korea has experienced.
Thankfully China realized that it had to get its act together, and it did successfully. Their old way of thinking was: “How do we get Marxism-Leninism/Maoism to make a high-growth economy?” Now, it’s “How do we get a high-growth economy, period?” The United States was really lucky economically especially because of the Civil War. Whereas in other countries wage labor and property rights, and inequality of wealth and income were often viewed as not much better than actual slavery and serfdom, people in the U.S. never fell into that illusion. The fight against slavery made men value labor and hard work, and personal liberty for its own sake. The South, after Reconstruction, realized that the “free labor” ideology of the Northern States and the Republican Party was actually creating more wealth than they had ever dreamed of under the plantation economy, and acknowledged deep within their hearts that this system, whatever it was, worked, and had made the U.S. the wealthiest nation in the world faster than they had even realized it – wealthier than the British Empire even, which was almost four times bigger and had an even greater ratio of population.
If the U.S. had maintained the unfettered free market throughout this century, our economy would be so powerful that the world would regard it as some magical force of nature…that is the power of free markets. It’s like the Midas Touch – it turns the natural, capital, labor, and knowledge resources of a nation and turns it to trillions of dollars, where nobody starves to death, and where the average person – who isn’t all that smart when you think about it – year after year produce a value of goods and services that are hitting $50,000.
In Communism, you can’t make $50,000/year because the systematic inefficiencies in the economic structure prevent the average person from contributing anywhere near that to merit an actual salary/wage of that amount. Therefore, people either make $10,000/year doing honest work, or get really rich through power and special connections. Only the extremely talented get wealthy due to their economic contribution. But all of these people could be making a middle income in the U.S. – the system in Communism is a far cry from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs – free market capitalism is the system where this quote, paradoxically, is realized. In an ideal free market, each person contributes what he is able to and each person buys what he needs – saving, investing, donating, or spending on other things what he has left!
-Jay
Its just ridiculous how some people just try to blame every thing on this President. If you want to be realistic you should know that the economy it is the way it is not cause of what the President has, or, has not done. “This” economy was inherited by President Obama from the previous administration. Right now we all should be thankful that the economy is not worst. The housing problem which it is the main reason for the economy’s problen it is now near the end of the problem. I do hope you realize that no human being can resolve the “worst economical disaster” in FOUR years. President Obama can and will take us through this very dificult situation if He is allow the time to do it. Be smart!!
One of the most absurd comments in the history of this blog. A simple Google search shows that Obama himself said he could solve the problems in three years!
Also, the financial crisis we face now is due to the same type of policies this president is advocating. It isn’t a problem of too little government, but too much government involvement where it doesn’t belong.
If the government had stayed out of the free market, we would not have this crisis.
what a convenient lie…if we are to believe that line of reasoning then no Administration could ever be held accountable for the state of the economy. Obama has taken us to the brink of insolvancy. Under Obama our credit as a nation has been downgraded for the first time in history. That can only be laid at the feet of Obama. He and the Democratic Congress took our national debt from 5 trillion and tripled it to 15 trillion. Now Obama is asking for another 1.6 trillion from the treasury, which will increase our national debt to over 16 trillion. This nation cannot survive another four years of Obama.