Whhy academics make for bad leaders...especially this one.

America's sophist in chief

By Colin McNickle
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, June 6, 2010

Listening to Barack Obama give a speech on economics is like listening to Jethro Bodine give a lecture on brain surgery. Both make your head hurt. And while Mr. Bodine, the fictional idiot of "The Beverly Hillbillies," didn't know any better, Mr. Obama, supposedly a real intellectual, should.

The president traveled to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University on Wednesday to yet again tout his vision of economic renewal and to rip Republicans for their supposedly regressive opposition to his supposedly "progressive" agenda.

The rhetoric, much of it Orwellian and liberally peppered with a half-baked political screed, came straight from the dented-can section of the grocery store. Obama is an accomplished shaman of the genre. But that's not a compliment. For this president, perhaps more than any other in the modern era, is infected with the virus (and vocabulary) of what late Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek called "the fatal conceit."

"(W)hile wisdom is often hidden in the meaning of words, so is error," Professor Hayek reminded. "Naive interpretations that we now know to be false ... survive and determine our decisions through the words we use."

And many of these words, he added, carry misleading connotations. Those misrepresentations can be purposeful, ignorant or a combination of both and oftentimes count on the ignorance of the masses.

"Indeed, many words embodied in our language are of such character that, if one habitually employs them, one is led to conclusions not implied by any sober thought about the subject in question, conclusions that also conflict with the scientific evidence," Hayek said.

Here are just two of many examples from Obama's CMU speech:

• "We can't guess with 100 percent accuracy what industries and innovations will next shape our world."

Yet the federal government continues to insist that it can pick economic winners with your money. Most of these attempts at a government-directed marketplace are not sustainable for the simple reason that they do not represent the most efficient allocation of resources.

The only way they are "sustainable" is either with heavy taxpayer subsidies, the heavy hand of government manipulation, repeated misrepresentations (lies) and repeated government interventions (more lies) to mask their failure.

Think of the Obama administration's energy and environmental endeavors. Many don't pass fundamental cost-benefit analyses. Think ethanol. Think solar and wind power. Think cap and trade.

• "(W)e have recognized that there have been times when only government has been able to do what individuals couldn't do and corporations wouldn't do. ... That's how we have Social Security, a minimum wage. ... There have always been those who've said no to such protections and investments. There were accusations that Social Security would lead to socialism and that Medicare was a government takeover."

Never mind that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme (the definition of unsustainability), that wage floors constrict the number of jobs, or that Medicare -- rife with waste and fraud and facing a projected $38 trillion shortfall -- hardly is a program that should be touted as a "success."

Such sophistry hardly is new to politicians. But Barack Obama, America's sophist in chief, certainly has become its most baldfaced practitioner.