I recall Gorilla Monsoon using this stock phrase a lot in the eighties, when he announced for the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). Monsoon was straight man to Bobby “The Brain” Heenan (aka “The Weasel”) in what was really a LOL wrestling commentary comedy team at the time.
Here’s a taste:
Anyway, Monsoon, while calling a match, would often say ‘stick a fork in him, he’s done!’ – especially when a favored superstar would put away a jobber opponent with a signature move. This phrase was awakened from the deep recesses of my mind when I applied Friday’s dismal jobs report to the electoral future for the Empty Suit Known as Barack Hussein Obama.
I have a mental image of the realities of market economics body splashing into Barry O’Bama from the top rope as Heenan (always favoring the ‘heel’ in ring match ups by design) yells ‘oh no!’ and Monsoon gives us his charcoal grilling related cliché.
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As we all know, since James “The Crazy Cajun” (that would be his pro wrestling persona) Carville told us in 1992, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ when it comes to a sitting President’s re-election fortunes.
Well, the economy sucks. It sucks due to Barack Hussein Obama’s policies.
BHO is a dyed-in-the-wool statist who believes the state is the sole source of wisdom, wealth and well-being. His hard Left ideology fundamentally holds individuals, private institutions (i.e. institutions not under the state’s thumb), and the free market in contempt. This ideology assumes all of you are too stupid and too selfish to live a properly ordered life without the state dictating and mandating even the tiniest aspects of how you lead it. Mayor Nanny Bloomberg and his war on soft drinks in servings larger than 16 ounces is but one recent example.
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BHO took this ideology into office flying high on Icarus-like wings given to him by the republic’s bout with temporary insanity over the empty slogan ‘Hope and Change’. The hype only encouraged the inexperienced narcissist to tack hard left, too close to the sun if you will, and the result is now he is nothing more historically than yet another cautionary tale about the folly of statist economics. He and his corrupt gang of American Progressives join the Soviets, Maoists, Euro Zone Socialists, and others, as prime examples of how command driven cradle-to-grave nanny state economies inevitably spread the most misery to the largest number of people.
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This blog project set out in December 2009 to make the case against this ideology – you know, “Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive.” 245 posts later (counting this one), by far the most read post, according to Google Analytics, was posted August 27, 2011 – “In a Democracy, the People Get the Government They Deserve.” It’s one the better examples of the quirky, intentionally humorous (in a sarcastic way), intentionally Obama-mocking (in an intentionally Alinskyite way), literary style I developed here. I especially like the concluding visual of the ‘Deserve’ post, as a pithy statement of where we’ve come since the last Presidential election. It is an image of somebody else’s bumper sticker with the statement “If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you are not racist, you’ll have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you’re not an idiot.”
But the best LAS post to explain why the economy still sucks this far into BHO’s so-called recovery is “Stuck on Keynesian Stupid” – posted here on May 11, 2011. The following excerpt is the meat of the matter.
Keynesian economics is a top down, centrally managed, command driven, theory that assumes "experts" can direct capital where it is most needed in a complex market system. Hayek’s competing framework is a bottom up model based on the idea that trusting individuals to make independent decisions in their own self-interest produces the most good for the greatest number of people.
According the macro-economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, the $862 Billion stimulus package that was BHO’s first significant act should have had the US economy humming along beautifully by now. According to the theory, public “experts” pumping huge amounts of public cash into the private economy revitalizes the private economy - and BHO's stimulus was the biggest money pump in human history.
It didn’t work in the Great Depression of the 1930’s, it didn’t work for Japan in the 1990’s, and it’s not working now. The reason it never works is the false premise that government money pumped into the private economy is somehow “new” to the economy. A moment’s reflection exposes the fallaciousness of this premise. Governments only have two ways to raise revenue: (1) print new paper money, which is not actually new wealth, and is therefore inflationary (unless interest rates are artificially held down - which is the building stress fracture in US monetary policy right now), or (2) tax existing wealth out the private economy – which merely redistributes wealth from one set of private hands to another, with overhead built into the transfer to fund the government intervention itself. Governments simply produce no new wealth, ever.
Hayek, on the other hand, based his macroeconomic theories on the far more subtle notion of spontaneous order. That is, for my purposes here, the complex system of exchange between self-interested consumers and producers does something truly magical – it actually creates new wealth in the economic system merely via the exercise of economic activity. Every time a producer supplies a valuable product or service to a consumer, the fair market value the consumer provides back in exchange is economic activity. When government policy encourages and rewards economic activity, over time it results in measurable economic growth, which is good to one degree or another for everyone.
I then went on, in a spasm of pure genius, to set up a direct measurement of real world results comparing and contrasting the economic performance of the Leftist Obama with the man who won the Cold War without firing a shot.
It turns out our 40th President – Ronald Reagan - implemented policies inspired by the Hayek school of thought. It also turns out Mr. Reagan “inherited” a deep recession very similar to the one Mr. Obama told us at the beginning of his term he would fix with his Keynesian Stimulus package.==
The Wall Street Journal recently compared the growth in GDP during the two officially measured “recoveries,” and found Messrs. Keynes and Obama to be lagging Messrs. Hayek and Reagan considerably. I took the Journal’s numbers, covering the first seven quarters of official “recovery,” and captured them in a very sophisticated charting system known as MS Excel. Here’s the chart for quarters one through seven. (I think I’ll bring this chart back, updated, each quarter moving forward. The trend will not change, trust me on that.)
Here’s the updated chart, folks. Hint: Longer is better.
BHO and His Corrupt Gang of Progressives are Keynesian statists through and through. These plainly measurable results mean nothing to them. They are sooooooooo stuck on Keynesian stupid their only policy proposals seem to be stuff like tax credits for businesses to hire for the mere sake of hiring and “targeted infrastructure” spending.
AYFKM?
The first proposal belies a complete lack of understanding of how the market economy works. There is no tax break big enough to convince any business to hire someone to sit on their hands. Businesses hire when they grow, and a legitimate internal demand for help develops. When such need develops, there is no tax break small enough to deter the hiring transaction. The employee that costs more than he or she creates in revenue has a label – “layoff” - unless they’ve scored a public sector union gub’ment position of course, at least up until now (oblique reference to tomorrow’s historic Wisconsin recall referendum).
The infrastructure thing is so LOL funny it’s sad. The only beneficiaries are a narrow band of specially trained, union connected, construction laborers. Trust me, they are already busy. Every f*ck*in exit on the DC Beltway has a construction project that never seems to finish, snarling traffic like only Communists could. The unions really screwed up when they became a giant pain in the a$$ for everybody else.
One more time, just to make sure it sinks in …
Footnote
The staff cartoonist has been given his assignment.
