Dr Hanson at his best
6. Keynesian economics are about over for a generation. The antidote to the Bush $4 trillion debt was not another $4 trillion in less than half the time. With near-zero interest rates, record numbers of Americans on food stamps and unemployment, an annual federal budget $2 trillion higher than just ten years ago, and nearly $16 trillion in aggregate debt — and all this along with a moribund economy — few will any longer believe that printing more money and growing government work. More of what has not worked won’t magically start to work.
7. Barack Obama has essentially ended the smears against the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols. Having himself smeared the prior administration relentlessly, he became de facto its greatest defender. One cannot insist past practices were immoral or illegal and then embrace or expand them all. “War criminal” will recede into the insanity of yesteryear, given that no logician could figure out how waterboarding three self-confessed mass murderers was a crime, while vaporizing two thousand suspected terrorists — including American citizens — by Hellfire missiles is not. Apparently Guantanamo is no longer a gulag, rendition no longer a crime, preventive detention no longer a shredding of the Constitution.
8. Politics simply don’t change. Obama first embraced and then rejected filibusters — the only constant was his relative political position. “Gridlock” was good in 2005, bad in 2011. The suggestion that we should cancel congressional elections for a few years comes from a Democratic governor, not a cigar-chewing, epauletted ex-general. Exasperated liberals call for circumventing the “messy” democratic process, the bothersome Electoral College, the unfairness of senatorial elections — apparently not out of long-expressed philosophical worries, but out of angst that the wonderful system that elected Obama and gave him huge congressional majorities suddenly became unworkable, say, around November 2010. |
