The Grand Design

Back in the late 1970s and into the early eighties when John Maynard Keynes was dead and thankfully Ronald Reagan wasn't, a breed of economist who were consistently pessimistic were featured prominently on national media. They generally forecast bad times that were only destined to grow worse and that was when Barack Hussein Obama was still in short pants. Their number featured Joe Granville and Howard Ruff and their predicted gloom would have been dead on had Jimmy Carter somehow won reelection. The most prominent voices brimming with optimism to counter the predicted malaise were a handful of right wing economists who appeared on Wall Street Week and the host himself, the (lamentably) late Louis Rukeyser. It was not merely atmospherics but substantive changes in policy, not Ronald Reagan's glowing optimism but the new direction of government that turned the economy around. The difference between then and now being that Jimmy Carter was a bumbler surrounded by even lesser men and Barack Obama isn't. Everything Barack Hussein Obama does in office has an easily foreseeable result, which is to suggest that the economic dislocation being wrought is absolutely intentional. The more America's fiscal house is wrecked, the more power Obama aggregates to himself and his cadre. The bromide goes "failing to plan is planning to fail", but in Obama's case, planning the nation's ungentle decline is intended to produce drastic dependency on government and foster a new authoritarianism.