Roger Kimball wonders if the seeming wilful ongoing destruction of the American economy by the new administration is a result of incompetence or malice.
It’s hard to know for sure, of course. Back in the nineties, J. Porter Clark (at sci.space.*) came up with a variation on Clarke’s Third Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”), now known as Clark’s Law: “Any sufficiently advanced cluelessness/incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” I think it was in reference to spam, but it would seem to apply to current economic policy as well.
That’s a reversal of Napoleon – “Never ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity”
I think you can say that the inverse of Clark’s law also holds as well (i.e. Sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from malice.)
As for Jane’s comment, Napoleon is saying words of wisdom (though I’m not sure how it holds up now) but Clark’s law is addressing a common observation. Both don’t contradict, so Clark’s law isn’t a reversal of Napoleon per se.
Actually Jane, I believe it is called Hanlon’s Razor.
What better way to prove that putting part of our SS funds into the stock market or other investment vehicle is a bad idea, than to let the market go WAY down. I don’t think they set out to kill the market, it was spiraling down before the election. But they’ll ride the downward wave to prove their point.
Likewise, letting companies and unions be undermined works in their favor too. Where do most people get their health insurance? At work.
It’s a win / win for the new administration.
Ammo to fight talk of anyone personally deciding where their SS money goes. And BOHICA’S gub’ment health insurance will look good to anyone who is unable to COBRA or who has to take a new job with no or less insurance coverage.
The question is, HOW LONG before anyone from the administration says these things about insurance or investments?
An objection to ascribing any of this to a combination of both malice and stupidity would be, in order to know how to implement their malice, they would have to be not stupid.
The reply would be that the stupidity is not in knowing (or not) how to implement their malice, but in wanting to implement it.
I’ve got enough malice to put the Sith to shame — but I’m smart enough to recognize the downside to trying to take over the universe. And that’s even before the assassination attempts begin.
Ha ha, Steve, no, see the Master Plan of Wile E. Obama, Super Genius, is to drive the market to absurdly low prices. At that point we invest all the SS trust money in the market.
Then Obama tears off the mask, reveals the rational centrist beneath the screwball exterior, and the markets shoot up, earning fantastic returns for those SS dollars, easily paying for the boomer’s retirement. Meanwhile, those in government who need to be interned in camps and only given crayons, for their own safety, have been flushed out by the short regime of insanity. Bwa ha ha.
I think Jane means the “contrapositive,” since Clark’s Law and the observation of l’empereur have the same truth value.
Whether incompetence or malice, the harm done is enough cause to oppose the policies and cal for the removal of the man ASAP. The evaluation of incompetence vs. malice can wait until deciding whether to bring criminal charges after he’s removed from office.
Jon Stewart explains why the Dow is the best assessment of President Obama’s performance: http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=220253&title=the-dow-knows-all
You do know how the Constitution works, right? We can’t sack him because the market is down. This isn’t Parliament.
I guess not even Jon Stewart can be funny every night. Or right. Clearly the DJIA’s plunge (along with all the other indexes) is a deep discounting of America’s wealth with every law and order Obama puts into place.
You do know how the Constitution works, right?
Do you? Congress can impeach and remove the president for any reason, or haven’t you been paying attention? And if He doesn’t change trends by next spring, it might be the only self-preservation move left for the Dems in Congress. (all they’d need is to appeal to bipartisanship to get Stupid Party Senators like Specter and the Maine Twins and achieve a two-thirds majority.)
The hate America crowd has been trying to destroy this country for generations. Now in power they are doing it. Does it matter if it’s intentional or not?
Whether incompetence or malice, the harm done is enough cause to oppose the policies and cal for the removal of the man ASAP
Goodness, take a deep breath, Pete. Pour yourself a schnapps. Kick off the shiny black jackboots and wiggle your toes a bit.
Better now? OK. Give the man, Obama, a chance. He’s not completely stupid. You can’t get to be President with an IQ of 95. So there’s the chance he’ll figure out which direction is up, that 2 + 2 = 4, et cetera, and adjust accordingly.
With his popularity among the Left, he is the ideal person to lead the Democrats out of the aristocratic academic Marxist wilderness in which they’ve been wandering. He could pull a Sister Souljah, kick the Stalinists in the teeth, tell the bruthas and whiners to STFU and get a job, admit he was sold a loud of unworkeable crap by his teachers, and proceed to lead the Democrats back to sober American centrism.
Stop laughing, the rest of you. It’s possible. Stranger things have happened, albeit not in my lifetime.
Anyway, it’s to allow for these kinds of turnabouts that we have elections every four years, instead of every four weeks, or every four minutes. We elect ’em, then give them a chance. Come 2012, or even 2010, we’ll be able to purge anyone who hasn’t learned his lesson. And, really, even Democrats can’t ruin the country beyond repair in two years. It takes more time to really wedge things up. We’re cool.
Carl,
Cool and rational as always. I just heard that Obama’s first four month’s resulted in about twice the market fall of the previous top dog, FDR.
31% Obama
16% and 9% FDR.
You really think he’s incapable of creating disaster given four years to do it? He’ll keep it up. He’ll keep blaming others. He will continue to mesmerize.
I hope you are right and our founders checks and balances continue to work. People are waking up. Will it be enough, or has money tipped the balance of power too far?
I don’t have much hope if we continue to have conservative candidates that are not.
Bob: [Jon Stewart link] — heh.
The ironic thing that stood out for me — as I watched Stewart once again make himself the leftist ass — was how the audience wildly applauded Stewart’s fast-talking “debunking” of the significance of capital market indices. To me, this was more evidence that a significant fraction of our citizens are clueless idiots.
BBB
Before we look forward to yet another impeachment of a US president, wouldn’t it be nice to wait till the guy actually does a “high crimes and misdemeanors” thing? As I see it, the Democrats, including Obama, were elected to do exactly what they are doing.
misdemeanor n. A misdeed. Law. An offense less serious than a felony.
Driving our economy into the tank at an unprecedented rate? Might that not be a misdeed? You expect him to get better? What indicates that? He’s so smart and articulate? That’s how we got here.
Impeachment, however is a worthless endeavor. Too many idiots.
No one is going to remove Obama. Not when the alternative is President Joe Biden. No matter how clueless Obama comes across, he’s a freaking genius compared to Biden. Putting Biden in as VP was perhaps the smartest thing Obama has ever done. Hell, even I’d catch a bullet for Obama to prevent Biden from becoming president. Let’s not forget who is third in line for the presidency, none other than Nancy Pelosi.
I’m certainly no fan of Obama, but impeachment is a dumb idea. As Karl suggests; the actions of the stock market are a direct result of legitimate policies. The way to stop the policies is to point out the folly of the policies.
Obama is a man that can be easily replaced. What needs to be removed for eternity is the crazy notion that punishing success is the way to be progressive.
> Not when the alternative is President Joe Biden. No matter how clueless Obama comes across, he’s a freaking genius compared to Biden.
Actually, Biden has at least two advantages over Obama.
(1) Incompetent malicious people are less dangerous than competent malicious ones.
(2) Biden is, relatively speaking, a small-time grifter.
That said, Pelosi is more dangerous than Biden.
So there’s the chance he’ll figure out which direction is up, that 2 + 2 = 4, et cetera, and adjust accordingly
The stock market in many ways is a futures contract on the likelihood of this happening. The stock market says, nope.
But, yeah, impeachment, not so good an idea either.
The Great Depression got into full fury, not at the tail end of the Hoover Presidency but in the very opening months.
So we now know what the “H” in B. H. Obama stands for . . .
Paul, that’s actually the FDR-worship point of view, that what Hoover did or didn’t do in the initial months of the Depression gave it such a huge inertia of some kind or other that it took a full decade of work by FDR to change trajectory.
The same logic is at work among the Obamanauts today. See, what GWB and the eeeevil Republicans did from 2001 to 2007 (or 2009 if you forget that Democrats took over Congress in 2007) gave the economy such massive downward momentum that it’s going to take Nancy and Barack quite a long time — and quite a lot of your money — to change the trajectory.
It’s all horseshit, of course. The economy has no such thing as “inertia,” its dynamics are far more Brownian than Newtonian. Sensible economiists have long understood that what happened to the economy in 1937 had nearly nothing to do with what Hoover did in 1930, and everything to do with what FDR was doing in ’36 and ’37.
In the same sense, sensible people understand that the massive tanking of the Dow and the continuing explosion in unemployment today, March 2009, have very little to do with what Bush and the Republican Congress did in the summer of 2006, and a lot more to do with what Obama and the Democratic Congress did in February of 2009.
This is not to say that Obama and Congress can determine the economic situation (GDP growth and unemployment, say) at any time they want. But they most certainly can influence the change in those numbers (various time derivatives of them) any time they want. If O and the Dems took sensible steps today, the market would respond within hours, and unemployment within days. Which time derivative (first, second,….) would tick up, because it’s directly coupled to government action, I don’t know, so it’s not clear how sharp the curve in the right direction would be. But it would be there.
Leland Said:
“…As Karl suggests; the actions of the stock market are a direct result of legitimate policies. …”
Since when does the constitution authorize Congress to do much of anything in the recent so called stimulus bill? Or most of the other democrat policies businessmen and investors are reacting against?
Peter,
Congress has been granted these powers by Article I, section 8 of the US Constitution.