On Saturday November
3, 2012 the Wall Street Journal published an article by challenger Mitt Romney
and another article by incumbent Barack Obama – both articles being the closing
arguments made by the candidates before the electors go to the polls the
following Tuesday and elect one or the other to be President of the United
States of America for the next four years.
The Romney article
came under the title: “A New Direction For America” and the subtitle: “A
Romney-Ryan administration will confront the problems that politicians have
avoided for a decade.” The Obama article came under the title: “Real Progress,
But We're Not Done” and the subtitle: “Americans shouldn't surrender to the
same philosophy that hurt the middle-class families for so long.”
The two articles
have a theme common to them. They both recognize the economy as being the most
important subject in this debate. Romney summarized his argument this way: “Our
plan … will create jobs … and put America back on the path of …
opportunity … This, in turn, will enable us to … promote the principles of
peace as leaders of the Free World.”
As to Obama, he
summarized his argument this way: “Our free market is … driven by risk-takers,
innovators and dreamers. Our people succeed when they … get a good education
and learn new skills ... so do the businesses that hire them, or the companies
they start … When we support research … new industries will start here and stay
here. We grow faster when our tax code rewards … companies that create jobs in America .”
Although the two
candidates are tackling the same subject, the reader cannot avoid being
impressed by the fact that the Romney argument looks like an empty plate while
the Obama argument looks like a full meal. And so, you ask: Why is it that
Romney could only promise that his plan will create jobs and put America to
work without giving details, whereas Obama was able to give a list of specific
actions he implemented as President and will continue to implement if reelected
thus realize for America what Romney could only ask the reader to imagine?
And the answer is
that Romney never thought seriously about the promise he just made because he
has been saying something different for more than a year. The point he kept making
was that America 's
prosperity depended on its ability to scare the world. To do this, he argued
over and over, would make America so respected everywhere that no one will dare
challenge it, and this will mean prosperity for the people – but don't ask how
that works. In brief, Romney has been arguing for the transformation of the
American economy into a war economy, a move that every sane person could see
was the perfect accelerator to America 's
total ruin.
Understandably, the
public rejected that economic policy which – to be fair about it – was
fashioned not by Romney alone but by him working with a group of neocon
advisers and tea-party handlers; all of whom adhere religiously to the dogma of
a permanent state of war for the nation. And so, when the public rejection
came, Romney threw the policy in the faces of the neocons and tea-partiers who
formulated it.
The consequence of
this has been that Romney found himself unable to formulate a new policy he
could sell to the public in the short period of time that was left for him to
do so. All he could do was make a promise that was still based on the same old
dogma but without repeating the militaristic details that turned off the
public. And the plate he put on the table looked empty when compared to Obama's
full meal.
The question to ask
now is this: How and why did Romney and his group go so far off the rail, they
could not put together an economic policy that the public would accept? Well,
my dear reader, the answer to this question is long and complex. It takes up
the rest of the discussion and goes as follows: There are many ways to look at a
situation. This means there is an infinite number of metaphors we can invent to
describe the same thing. And sometimes it is useful to invent several metaphors
to highlight each part of a complex situation thus give a full description of
it.
A situation of this sort would be the design of an economic
policy for a jurisdiction that is as big as America . What you see in most
discussions is the tendency to use the metaphor of the silver bullet. That is,
some of the people who discuss the subject do so not because they understand it
in depth but because they come indoctrinated with a dogma that is meant to
serve a political or social agenda in which the economy is seen to play a role.
They see the dogma as being the silver bullet that can lead to a good economy
and to prosperity. This was the case with Romney's neocons and tea-partiers who
saw the adherence to a permanent state of war as being the dogma that will save
the American economy.
And when you speak of a political or social agenda, you
speak of a wide spectrum of positions that extend from the extreme Left to the
extreme Right in the system of governance itself. But no matter where some
people may stand on that spectrum, they would have so little understanding of
the economy; they talk about it as if it were a simple mechanism that has only
one or two moving parts which – if taken care of – will lead to the cure that
will make everything right.
And so, to appeal to the “base” that decided to support him
only grudgingly, Romney chose to advocate the positions of the extreme Right
(severe conservatism as he put it) even though he started his political life as
a moderate who took after his father, George Romney, who was more of a pacifist
than a war monger. And when addressing the general public as he does in his
latest article, Mitt Romney could not help but flip-flop, a trait that is
innate to him to begin with, and that makes him look and sound flaky as well as
shallow.
But an economy is a complex mechanism that has many moving
parts each of which requires a tool that is specific to it. The tool is used to
maintain the part in good operating condition at every moment. This means that
to have a good economy, you cannot just get the one or two parts that dogma
says you ought to have, get them operating and go to sleep expecting the
economy to perform on its own without supervision or tune-ups.
No, this approach has never worked for an extended period of
time as shown by the periodic shocks that unregulated economies always
experience. And yet, this is what Romney and his team are advocating at a time
when the electors are still suffering from the shock produced by the policies
of a previous administration which Romney promises to emulate.
What you need instead is a box full of tools of every
description to take care of all the parts in the existing mechanism. More than
that, you need a roster of ideas and drawings for contingency tools you may
have to fashion in a hurry if and when the need will arise as surely it will.
Planning for the contingency is necessary to take care of the unexpected when
it strikes, and the existing tools prove inadequate to respond to the resulting
emergency. Only then will you have a complete set-up that is made of a
mechanism which produces wealth and can repair itself if necessary.
If you wish, you may do better than that by including in the
toolbox of your economic system a mechanism that will allow it to evolve and
keep up with a world that is itself growing and changing with time. This, in
fact, is what President Obama has in his toolbox as demonstrated by his
four-year presidency and his latest article.
As to Romney, he is nowhere near this level of
sophistication when it comes to understanding how an economy works or what the
world out there is about aside from the knowledge that secret bank accounts
exist in places where he can hide his money to evade paying taxes in America
where he accumulated the money in the first place.
And he wants to be President of America?