Good Intentions Aside, Are We Killing the Patient?
By BEN STEIN
Published: July 11, 2009
HERE’S a funny story that made the rounds in Washington a long time ago: It’s 1955, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower has just suffered a heart attack. He is recuperating in his hospital bed. Richard M. Nixon, the vice president, comes in and says: “General, I am so sorry this has happened. Is there anything I can do to help? I’ll do anything at all.”
Ike looks over at him wanly and says, “Well, you could get your foot off my oxygen tube.”
I heard this fanciful joke from my mother, who, like me, was a huge fan of Nixon. I tell it because it reminds me of what’s going on with the
economy.
The sad truth is that the
economy is still extremely ill. The recovery we were all waiting for has not started in any meaningful way.
True, by many metrics, the
economy has stopped falling drastically, but we are still in a painful recession, large by postwar standards. The bank crises seem to have abated for now and Wall Street is paying itself fantastically well again, thank heavens, after being rescued with taxpayer money. But housing is still extremely weak, profits are miserable and, most important, far too many Americans are unemployed — roughly 9.5 percent, by the latest data.
Just as basic, far too many Americans are living in fear.
What is President Obama doing about it?
Perhaps too much. And, possibly, his efforts are too diffuse. When I think about the economy I think about a plump man who has just been hit by a truck while crossing a street and is in severely critical condition with internal bleeding. Instead of just stabilizing his hemorrhaging, the doctor decides that while the patient is unconscious, he might as well also do a face lift, some coronary bypasses and a stomach-stapling to keep him from gaining weight while he is recovering (if he does recover). After all, a crisis is not to be wasted.
The problem is that all these ambitious operations create too much of a burden for the human body to bear.
Similarly, we have an administration that is simultaneously seeking to end the recession, discussing drastic changes to laws on foreclosures and energy use and completely changing the health care system. I respectfully question whether all of this makes sense.
I don’t believe we need to do something radical about energy, but even assuming that we do, why do it right now? Do we need to take one of the few sectors that is working like clockwork through the recession — oil refining — and wring its neck by making it pay for pollution “cap and trade” credits? Why attack a healthy industry when so many other sectors are ill? What is all of this anger at Big Oil, which has not done anything blameworthy, all about? Why endlessly beat up the companies that keep the country going?
All history is the history of class struggle, as Marx said, and I suspect that the rage of the news media and academic classes against the oil industry is a form of class struggle. But more on that in another column.
And do we need drastic work on the legality of foreclosures right now? I agree that foreclosures are a huge problem. But isn’t part of the housing quandary that banks are afraid to lend because they fear losing their collateral — the mortgaged home — if the laws change? Why add that level of uncertainty to an already dicey situation?
I utterly agree that health care should not be denied to Americans because they are poor. But where will the money come from in an
economy already on its knees? And if the government is going to print the money, won’t that add to the inflationary fears already hobbling the
economy? The huge increase in the monetary base is blamed for a spike in interest rates which are themselves hobbling the recovery.
Long ago, I had a talk with the late, great, much lamented writer and friend John Gregory Dunne at the Palm Restaurant in West Hollywood. I told him about the many things I was doing. It sounds good, he said, but you don’t want to become like one of those third-world countries that embarks on development so ambitious that it’s too much for the
economy and the country collapses.
I do not pretend that the analogy with 2009 America is precise, because it’s not. This is a huge first-world country. But there is enough truth that it makes me a bit uncomfortable. Maybe we should just concentrate on ending the recession and talk about the other plans later. Let’s consider just how much uncertainty is good for the
economy.
Or, in other words, let’s take government’s foot off the oxygen tube.
