If There Was Any Doubt...

The prize for dumbest foot-in-the-mouth moment of the decade has found a strong contender in Barack Obama's commentary on ATMs and jobs. You watch the video at the link and see him in his own words.

That right there is the man that the majority of Americans entrusted in 2008 to enact job-creating policy.

As a refresher, from me the guy who didn't graduate from college, here's how the economy works:

• A person decides to create or offer something that is attractive to others
• He markets the product or service, taking a risk in fashioning what's offered and its marketing, with no guarantee of reward
• People, once aware of it, decide whether or not to purchase it with their hard-earned money
• As people are attracted to it and purchase it, they increase the velocity of money around the entrepreneur, thus enabling his acquired wisdom about product creation to be applied in other pursuits

Further, how many purchases take place because people have quick and easy access to cash through the ATM? Without that convenience and ease, those purchases don't take place.

Harvard education as an achievement is utterly unremarkable. If this is the intellectual product of Harvard, then the curriculum is handicapping its students. A basic understanding of the economy ought to be evidenced in Harvard graduates - but alas, it is not to be. Instead, abject embarrassment.

by Brett Rogers, 6/15/2011 7:58:54 PM
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The higher you go in our educational system on a scale of "pretentious intellectual conceit", the less understanding of and respect for value you see - either the life-defining philosophical kind or the kind money is used to represent and exchange. Doing away with this concept has been the intellectual's goal for the US educational system since well before Dewey, under the misguided notion that a person with no understanding of the need for philosophical values could be spoon-fed the "right" ones, and a person with no understanding of economic value could be pushed either toward mindless consumerism or equally mindless socialism as needed.

Other than the obvious, there was one major flaw in the plan. The intellectuals thought they'd still be around to lead and control the resulting victims. And, in a sense, they are. But they never considered that they'd end up being part of the same system.

And they certainly never realized that, in a country "of the people, by the people, for the people", the political leadership would eventually come from that same pool.

Obama is the unintended yet overwhelming success of this effort.

Oops.

Fortunately for the world, having to deal with unfiltered, uncoddled, unsubsidized, non-politically correct, objective reality provides its own education on the existence of and desperate need for values, and provides an antidote of sorts. This is one reason that complete disrespect for the college educated runs in cycles. This has always been the brake on the runaway intellectual foolishness, and will be this time.

Let's just hope it's not too late.

Posted by Jonathan, 6/16/2011 1:00:22 AM