Good news, folks. Fear has been banished and greed is in!
Lawrence H. Summers, the White House economic adviser, calls it “the paradox at the heart of the financial crisis. “
“In the past few years, we’ve seen too much greed and too little fear; too much spending and not enough saving; too much borrowing and not enough worrying,” Summers said Friday in a speech to the Brookings Institution. “Today, however, our problem is exactly the opposite.”
In remarks to a private dinner at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, Summers was even blunter, according to an attendee: “Before, we had too much greed and too little fear. Now, we have too much fear and too little greed.”
Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if Mr. Summers boss and his Demcoratic allies on Congress hasn’t spent the past six months intentionally sewing fear and smack-talking any attempt to make a profit at all as grounds for tarring and feathering.
On the other hand, if you read the President’s budget, you will get exactly the opposite message from the one Summers is spreading today.
Of course, the truth is that what the President really wants to do is dictate exactly the correct level of “greed” and “fear”. He wants to decide just how much you should make in order to “make our society more just”. That’s why you see such conflicting message from the adminstration. They’ve pushed things too far in the fear direction and now they’re trying to push it back the other way.
There really is no way for anyone to know what crazy talk will come out of the Obama administration from day to day because there’s no way for anyone to know what the President considers “just” including the President himself. The fundamental problem with progressive economic policies is that they require constant adjustment by flawed human buildings as they move toward some capriciouslly-chosen goal that will reflect the utopian dreamland they carry in their heads. Much like an artist who tries to paint a symphony, the average progressive will never quite get on canvas what they see in their heads because one does not translate perfectly to the other. Unlike that artist, however, said progressive will never stop tinkering with their work because he believes that he is the one who can do what generations of progressives before him failed to do (for various reasons that never sem to involve the progressives themselves). So he tinkers and tinkers without ever stopping to ponder how an imperfect being can create a perfect world.
That constant and often random tinkering, more than anything, is the reason that our economy is in such pathetic shape. Financial markets must have stability. No sensible person is going to invest their money in a highly-volatile market which is why the folks with the cash are sitting back and waiting for the President to stop running around like his head was on fire.
The way things are going, they’re likely to be waiting until 2012.
Tags: Big Government, Lawrence Summers, Nanny Fascism, President Barack Obama, Progressives
