Hope Is a Four Letter Word

If you have any interest in current affairs, you'll want to read this editorial in yesterday's Wall Street Journal entitled From McNamara to Obama.  As much as I'd like to believe that some good ideas will solve all of our problems, Barack Obama's rhetoric makes me nervous, and Bret Stephens does a good job putting the reason for my nervousness into words.

Here's one paragraph which will give you some idea:

McNamara, who died yesterday at 93, will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. Whatever else distinguishes JFK's New Frontier or LBJ's Great Society from Barack Obama's "New Foundation," this too is an era of soaring rhetoric, big plans and boundless self-regard, issued by an administration convinced it can apply technocratic, top-down solutions to huge and unpredictable systems -- the banking, auto and health-care industries, for instance, or the climate. These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase "the best and the brightest" has been scrubbed of its intended irony.

Here we go again.

Technorati Tags: Rober McNamara, Barack Obama, Kennedy, William Easterly, Vietnam

Comments

[Jeannette Paladino]

The problem is that we're in uncharted territory. A war, a recession, record debt, a disfunctional health care system. I for one hope that Obama is a roaring success. Do the Republicans have any answers?

[Don MacLeod]

Phooey.

Leaving the auto industry, health care industry and climate controls in the hands of the private market has resulted in:

- A bankrupt GM
- 40,000,000 uninsured Americans
- Global warming

In short, the much beloved "free market" doesn't work as well as the ideologues of the WSJ editorial page would like to believe.
Those systems are not as "unpredictable" as you want to believe. In fact, since you can reliably predict that each of them will work solely for their own self-interest, they are remarkably predictable. I think Obama's correctives are necessary and a long-overdue balance to the unregulated markets that wreck themselves regularly for the exact same reasons that have wrecked themselves in the past.