At the moment, the administration's so far over its head in problems there seems nowhere to turn. Major foreign policy’s been relinquished to Vladimir Putin, Iraq’s been lost to Iran and Al Qaeda, while US overseas influence hasn’t been lower than at present since 1970. Forty-three years of effort, expenditure, investment and success in the Middle-East have been squandered away for absolutely no logical reason.
Here at home, although unemployment's reached a new low this week, two states didn’t submit data at all, which likely accounts for the drop. At the same time, while implementation of the new health care tax faces significant start-up problems, the largest unions and most fervent incumbent supporters now demand the legislation be rewritten whereas the costs are so high they fear losing significant numbers of members to health care exchanges.
Then, while the political implosion continues, since the Fed’s getting a new chairman I did some research on one of the candidates, Larry Summers.
Wikipedia shows that he was “on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. He also served as an economic adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.”
But what interested me most were some of his thoughts over time. Such as a 1991 interview where he said, "There are no... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn't a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs."
His bio goes on to note that “Summers also has been authoring a column for the Financial Times. Upon the death of libertarian economist Milton Friedman, Summers wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times entitled "The Great Liberator" arguing that "any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites." In it Summers wrote that even though Friedman's contributions to monetary policy had been highly lauded, his most important contribution may have been "in convincing people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate.”
After reading the preceding, I looked up Mr. Friedman and found that he was “an economic adviser to Republican U.S. President Ronald Reagan. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention.”
Among years of developing economic premises one called “The Methodology of Positive Economics," written in 1953 argues that economics as a “science should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction. That is, students should measure the accuracy of its predictions, rather than the 'soundness of its assumptions.”
Therefore, interpreting his opinion it seems to me he believed that results are the only measure that counts regarding any kind of economic idea or theory, while “assumptions” have no value at all till proven. Which is the exact opposite of the position taken by the present administration that has permitted the entire economy to stagnate by employing theories of redistribution that do not now, or in the future ever work in reality.
I mention this because while just about everything the administration touches has turned out a colossal failure, it seems to me that left alone someone like Larry Summers might actually be a good choice for the economy. And therefore, extremely beneficial in helping turn things around. However, if nothing else, the administration's extremely consistent, which suggests that some one else will get the job.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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