The New York Sun has an article today called “Sarah Palin for the Fed?” in which they discuss how the former governor of Alaska and 2008 vice-presidential candidate has been running rings around all of Barack Obama’s high-priced, high-powered, ideologically impeccable financial men:
“The big question as Chairman Bernanke gets set for his first quarterly press conference is how Sarah Palin was able to figure out sooner than everyone else that the Federal Reserve’s campaign of quantitative easing wouldn’t work. Disappointment in the Fed’s policies is being reported this morning at the top of page one of the New York Times. It reports that ‘most Americans are not feeling the difference’ from the Fed’s ‘experimental effort to spur a recovery by purchasing vast quantities of federal debt.’ It reports that ‘a broad range of economists say that the disappointing results show the limits of the central bank’s ability to lift the nation from its economic malaise.’”
Not bad for an ignorant wingnut chillbilly breeding machine, so contemptible that even her youngest children are fair game for vicious slander!
As the Sun notes, Palin was quick to point out “the connection between a weak dollar and rising prices for oil and food.” How interesting that all those solons in the Administration, and all the fashionable newspapers that breezily dismiss Palin as a moron when they’re not accusing her of incitement to murder, missed such a simple and obvious point. Beware of elaborate economic theories that require you to check your common sense at the door. The basic laws of economics are quite simple, and they remain simple, no matter how many layers of ideology and regulation are piled on top of them.
The secret to Palin’s remarkable gift of prophecy about Obama economic policy is simple. She understands that prosperity can never return while the private sector is growing smaller. The growth of government reduces the size of the private sector by definition. Manipulating monetary policy to influence economic activity is one way in which economic liberty is replaced by central control. Inflation exists in the void created by the vanishing private sphere.
Of course these Big Government initiatives don’t create general prosperity. They can make some people richer, and some poorer… but as with any transfer of energy, something is lost in the transaction. A thousand dollars given to a “green” energy company does not mean a thousand taken from the private sector – it takes much more than that. Re-distribution has a very high overhead cost.
Voluntary transactions create wealth. Involuntary transactions destroy it. Learn this truth, and you’ll understand something beyond the comprehension of Barack Obama or any of his functionaries. You’ll also understand why so much of our bad economic news is “unexpected” to them. If we want prosperity, we must increase the size of the private sector… and that means the size of government must diminish, in both its funding and control.
That will involve a dramatic reversal of the current President’s agenda, which has been entirely focused upon making the public sphere larger. With that task accomplished to a nightmarish degree, his efforts are now directed toward telling the populace to stop complaining about the high prices and diminished quality of the world he created. What Barack Obama did to get us here was without precedent in the history of America. The actions necessary to save us will be without precedent in the history of the world.
How much is a dollar worth? What is the true value of gas, food, electricity, or an hour of your time? In the vanishing private sphere, we made those assessments ourselves, and we were richer for it… because a man who desires those things understands their value far better than a man who wishes to distribute them. It’s too bad no one in this hapless Administration listened to the woman from Alaska who was trying to explain that.
