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Gas Buddy
Best and brightest set to strike again
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Robert McNamara, dead at 93, was a policy-maker touched by brilliance, someone with all the answers and the record to prove it, although, of course, there came a day when he could not prove it. There came a day when he failed, and thousands paid the price with their lives. There's a lesson here, and Barack Obama should heed it.
The lesson was neatly summed up in a 1972 book, David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest," which told how President John F. Kennedy recruited some of the nation's top minds for his administration, people who then got us involved in a war in Vietnam we ended up losing at horrific cost.
McNamara was one of them, a former military analyst, a Harvard Business School teacher, one of the "Whiz Kids" who helped revitalize the Ford Motor Company. He served as secretary of defense under both Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, bringing with him something called "systems analysis," a sophisticated means of figuring out whether a policy would or would not work.
Whatever the merits of this intellectual tool, what McNamara and some of his colleagues needed more was some everyday, down-to-earth, practical sense, and that's what we also need from members of President Barack Obama's economic "dream team," including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers as chief of the National Economic Council and Christina Romer, serving as director of the Council of Economic Advisors.
Once in office, these officials quickly plotted an $800 billion stimulus package that was supposed to produce a couple of million jobs, even though (I am scarcely the first to note) a lesser effort by President George W. Bush accomplished nothing, and similar stimulus programs decades back accomplished nothing. Now that this stimulus is accomplishing nothing - we're at 9.5 percent unemployment and headed upward - the talk is that there may be another stimulus bill. Huh?
Along with others in the Obama administration, it is almost as if the dream team is trying to give us a federal remake of the California collapse, where regulatory overkill and an unmitigated, binge-a-day enthusiasm for spending has stripped the state government of actual dollars, causing it to rely instead on IOUs.
We're running up a debt increase that could amount to $11 trillion over the next 10 years and borrowing abroad and at home as if there were no tomorrow. Instead of reducing entitlement expenses that already have tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, Obama is planning a new health-care entitlement. Congress is so far cooperating on a global warming cap-and-trade tax that could put firms out of business, and the government is pushing for a regulation strategy at least as likely to strangle business as to prevent a new calamity.
The problem is hubris and an economics science made less reliable (as the columnist Robert Samuelson points out) by the extent and complications of globalization. The problem is that the best and the brightest do not know their limitations and keep trying to do what the market mostly might have done better either without their help or at least with more humble, cautious, restrained help.
Jay Ambrose writes for Scripps Howard News Service. E- mail: SpeaktoJay@aol.com.
Posted in Commentary on Friday, July 10, 2009 3:05 am
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