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Economic Idiocy or malice

Sometimes I'm glad I'm not an economist--not because someone called economics "the dismal science," and not because the world of economic prediction is so perilous, but because of the reason Mark Twain was glad he was not a medical doctor. He pitied doctors, he said, because they inevitably had to see people as hotbeds of disease and couldn't really appreciate even the most attractive person's beauty (see Life on the Mississippi, early on).

I pity economists because if I were one (especially a competent conservative one) I would probably be far more depressed than I am about the probable effects of the government takeover of entities the government doesn't have a ghost of a chance of running effectively.

Walter Williams explains the problem in a Feb. 18 article (still available via his archive here), and it rings so true even for a non-economist like me that every time i think about it, and about what President Obama and his Democrat majority in Congress are doing,I shake my head at the combination of arrogance and either ignorance or willful malevolence that characterizes their efforts to change our entire economic system.

Williams writes, "The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit. Why? It is impossible for anyone to possess the knowledge that would be necessary for such an undertaking." Williams goes on to prove his point with examples so clear that any fifth grader could understand them, if that fifth grader's mind wasn't too much clouded by government propaganda.

It is so much easier to destroy than to create. Every terrorist knows this and revels in it. What is this President and this congress really trying to do?