Sowell on Obama's Proposals

In yet another of a very long line of brilliant articles, Thomas Sowell asks the question: Are Facts Obsolete? In particular, he lays out a few of Barack Obama's economic proposals and shows how they all would be both nothing new and utter failures. In his usual fashion, he does it calmly, by showing how such ideas have fared in the past.

For example, he writes:

Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.

The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.

Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.

The entire article is not only worth reading, but studying, and not only for the facts he cites but the method he uses.

If it's true — though I strongly suspect it is not — that some Americans are eager to elect a black man for President to "compensate for America's past deeds," it's a pity they are looking to Barack Obama, and not Thomas Sowell. Were the latter the case, America would, indeed, be a far different place.