Three Vital Insights from Cato President Ed Crane

Six times per year, Cato directors, sponsors and friends receive a special memorandum from the president. I found five insights from Ed in the most recent issue that I want to share with you.

Do you remember August 15, 1971? Richard Nixon soberly (or perhaps not) informed the nation that henceforth there would be wage and price controls. That was going to control inflation—and the experts actually took him seriously. Please. And the gullibility of the media with regard to what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about, the Military-Industrial Complex, is astounding. The boys in the Project for the New American Century (Bolton, Woolsey, Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, et al.) had been clamoring for war with Iraq years before 9/11, which gave them their great opportunity. Now they’re pushing for war with Iran. These are not serious people. They believe in American Empire and have an undue influence on both sides of the aisle.
The bald, bearded oracle at the Fed actually thinks it’s his role to keep the United States economy humming along, not to mention determining what the right level of interest rates and money expansion should be. The media hang on his every pronouncement. Such silliness. Presidents are constantly setting up “commissions” to look into problems, like unemployment, entitlement reform, and alleged global warming. We are supposed to take seriously the “findings” of these commissions. We hold our breath waiting to see what the answer is. Each and every time, the true answer is simply freedom. But Washington attracts people who find freedom constraining with regard to their ability to control other people’s lives.
This fellow Obama is a menace. I think his ties to Saul Alinsky are utterly underappreciated. His recent commentary about “You didn’t build that” reveals an underlying and intense disdain, not just for the free-enterprise system, but for success. Indeed, that same riff he was engaged in included mocking references to hard work and intelligence. I once asked my colleague Gene Healy, who was a student at the University of Chicago law school while Obama was a lecturer there, why he never took a course with him. The answer was that Obama had a reputation as a very mediocre legal mind. Other than at Chicago, has he ever earned any money?

Check back for two more on Friday.