RSSScary People in the News, Part Two: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Gene Lalor | September 27, 2010
My second nominee for last week’s most scary people in the news is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a brilliant, Lebanese-born scholar, mathematician, epistemologist, and best-selling author who is scary for reasons different from Malik Zulu Shabazz’ scariness.
Shabazz is scary because he’s a dangerous black supremacist. Taleb is scary because he validates the opinion of millions of people who believe the President of the United States hasn’t a clue as to what he’s doing.
Taleb is the author of The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan Theory” refers “to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history.”
Taleb has concluded that Obama’s vaunted “stimulus,” the linchpin of the administration’s scheme for reviving and stimulating the American economy, the stimulus he now wants replicated, was probably the worst thing that could have been done toward that end.
Now, that’s not really news. The administration’s tried–and failed–mantra that, “Bush did it!” never did ring true since our economic mess was a bi-partisan effort caused not chiefly by GWB spending like a drunken Dem but by Democrat congresses. Bush was grossly wrong. However, for necessary perspective, it was the Dems–with Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, and ACORN in the vanguard–who made a bad situation worse..
Democrats set up the housing crisis which precipitated the banking crisis by forcing lending institutions, especially but not exclusively Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, to grant mortgages to too many people who didn’t have a pot to pee in but whom Frank and Dodd magnanimously felt were entitled to the American Dream, to own a home of their own
That’s an admirable goal on its surface but pockmarked by the realities that many people aren’t prepared, financially or in practicality, to own a home.
All that aside, back to Professor Taleb who is scary mainly because he reinforces what economic conservatives have felt all along but haven’t had sufficient mainstream support to prove our contentions that Obama and his fellow hotshots, his economic gurus who believed spending gazillions of dollars, would lead the country back to prosperity if not to the land of boundless milk and honey, were and are horses’ derrieres.
It’s disconcerting to be right when being right means your country is in a financial pickle the likes of which we haven’t witnessed since the Great Depression and from which extricating ourselves will take generations, if we can succeed at all.
In a speech last week, Taleb charged that Obama and his merry band of economic clods weakened the country’s economy by seeking to foster growth instead of paying down the federal debt. That logical route to solvency was lost on Obama’s misbegotten band of inept advisors and may be in process of being phased out.
Christina Romer had helped engineer the Obama plan for recovery from the 2008 recession which she skillfully engineered into the 2009 and 2010 recession. She resigned her position as Chairperson on the Council of Economic Advisors and retreated to academia no doubt to instruct young minds on how to destroy a nation’s economy. Ironically, as damaging as her economic advice was, Romer is back on board the Obama Express as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Gone too is top economist Lawrence Henry (Larry) Summers. Kicked out of the presidency of Harvard University on a no-confidence vote in 2006, Obama showed confidence in Summers by hiring him as Director of the White House National Economic Council after he flipflopped from totally believing the Milton Friedman view of the importance of free markets to belief in Obamanomics and government crippling those markets.
But the damage, perhaps grave damage, by Romer, Summers and Company has been done.
As Taleb said, “Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done. He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.” The intended–or unintended– consequences: ”Total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse:” http://tiny.cc/a9e2z
Obama and his fellow socialist gurus haven’t really been feeding America’s economy tranquilizers as much as they have been prescribing placebos, “cures” they knew damned well wouldn’t work but which would placate the masses and his socialistic base. Many of that mass are now waiting in unemployment lines.
Demonstrating that he hasn’t learned a bloody thing from the chaos he and his cohorts have created, Obama has now proposed a useless mini-stimulus of $150 billion to complement his maxi-stimulus uselessness in 2009 of $814 billion.
Has anyone in this administration noticed our national debt of $13.4 trillion? (http://tiny.cc/plgklhghzg)
The question remains: Is the man we were told is the most brilliant president America has ever had as stupid as he seems or is he as astute and as wily as that coyote who knows full well what he’s doing?
A nation in unremitted economic turmoil, in a freefall into total chaos, would be ripe for picking.
I don’t know who is scarier, a Malik Zulu Shabazz who merely wants to overthrow our government or a Nassim Nicholas Taleb who warns that our economy is in a toilet about to be flushed.
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