Arts & Ammo

The Good, the Bad, and the Economy

The economy is bad. Of course, I heard that repeatedly during the last eight years when the economy was essentially good, but now I believe it’s true. Blame is being assigned simply to “greed,” as though some fat cat took a couple of trillion home with him instead of donating it to the soup kitchen. In the case of Franklin Raines, that’s almost true.

But if we believe that greed was the policy of the Bush administration, and if stamping out greed becomes the policy of the Obama administration, then I think the return of good economic times will be a long way off. Only government could sell a policy so transparently feckless. Like a lot of people, I’m considering converting what’s left into cash and hiding it under the mattress. My portfolio has been spread around enough already.

I’m no economist. As a person reasonably well educated in other subjects, I probably understand the economy better than most people, and that’s a frightening thought. I like to think there’s a professional somewhere who has command of subjects I don’t, just like there’s some guy who knows how to put a used Toyota into orbit around Jupiter and someone who can cut me open and remove parts of me that I don’t need.

The dismal science seems all the more dismal because it appears there is no such person for economics. The professional economists who purport to know something are convincing us that they don’t.

Jacob Sullum’s column today struck me as right on the point: Everything bad is good again. Whatever the economists told you yesterday, they tell you the opposite today. Rising oil prices were bad, and falling oil prices are bad. High home values are bad; low home values are bad. You need to save more and now you need to spend.

Now maybe this is not fair to economists. It may well be that economists are smart guys who have the worst staff imaginable. I mean the 535 amateur economists who populate the halls of Congress. Whatever your field of expertise, imagine what would happen if you could translate your knowledge into results only by relying on Congress. Would you put these 535 people on your assembly line, lead them into battle, or ask them to sing the Hallelujah Chorus? Not likely. They are unmanageable, untrainable, and uninterested in results.

The electorate has just decided that Congress needs to get more involved in managing the economy. That seems to be the prevalent interpretation of the last election and will surely be the result.

So I suspect things will get worse, that Congress will cut me open and take parts of me that I do need, that they will blast prices into orbit and sing Hallelujah while the rest of us look on helpless.

Here’s hoping they don’t take over your area of expertise, too.

November 19th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Politics | one comment