Obama And The Wealth Of Nations Poem by gershon hepner

Obama And The Wealth Of Nations

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OBAMA AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS


Some people claim Obama is
a socialist. This myth
is wrong, he models bus-
iness on Adam Smith,
who said that though employers aim
to keep all wages low
when rules help workers they can claim
what their employers owe.

Society should intervene
to give support to schools
and navies of the king and queen;
according to these rules
it’s likely that today he would
compel support for health,
and make each taxing neighborhood
insure it with its wealth.

He hated the profusion and
the negligence he saw
caused by self interest in the hand
invisible to rule of law;
the legislators who defer
to their industrial leaders
he thought, harm us and err.
One of the readers
of Adam Smith appears to be
Obama. “Wealth of Nations.”
with economic liberty
may fill his expectations
far more than Marx, whose “Kapital”
depletes all nations’ wealth;
now in the nation’s capital
he follows Smith with stealth.

Inspired by an article by David Leonhardt in the NYT Book Review (“Theory and Morality in the New Economy, ” NYT, August 23,2009) :

The indispensable economist of the moment is clearly John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s prescription for financial crises — aggressive government action and, by definition, big budget deficits — has been Washington’s basic approach since Lehman Brothers collapsed last September. Eleven months later, the economy remains deeply troubled, and it probably will be for some time. But our Great Recession seems unlikely to turn into another Great Depression. It is impossible to know just how much credit the Keynesian approach deserves, because we can’t rerun the past year with a Hooverite economic strategy and see what would happen. Still, history seems to have vindicated Keynes. Likewise, it has indicted the laissez-faire philosophy that had been ascendant for most of the last three decades. The indispensable economist of that philosophy, of course, is Adam Smith. Smith’s invisible hand — which, in his description, guides an individual to promote the interests of society more effectually than he intends — has not looked so effectual lately. In Obama’s Washington, understandably enough, Keynes seems to be in and Smith out….
Last summer, during an interview shortly before the Democratic National Convention, I was asking Obama about the benefits and limits of a market economy, when he brought up Smith. “Adam Smith, at the same time as he was writing about the invisible hand, he was also writing about that moral sense — that human ecology — that allows a market to work: the sense that if I bring my goods into the market, someone is not going to hit me over the head; the sense that because I am trading with this guy often enough, that I know that the scales aren’t tampered with, ” Obama said. “That compact that we make is not just legalistic. It has to do also with our politics and our culture, and when that starts eroding it inhibits economic growth as well.” You can make a good case that, for all the talk-show chatter about whether Obama is a socialist, his agenda is in fact tinged with Smith. The administration’s various attempts to reduce inequality are meant, at their core, to make Americans feel as if the economic system is fair — that the scales haven’t been tampered with. In responding to the financial crisis, Obama eschewed the left’s calls for nationalizing the banks and instead kept them in private hands, albeit with public assistance. To reduce health care costs, he favors moving away from a fee-for-service system, which has the same perverse incentives Smith liked to denounce. Economic historians could doubtless have a spirited debate about whether Smith would have supported or disdained the White House’s agenda. But it’s reasonable to think that, either way, he would have had something trenchant to say about its chances of success. Among his more radical observations was that legislators tended to defer to those “masters” of industry, even when their aims would hurt the citizenry. To put it another way, economic theory can do only so much for a president. The rest falls to politics.

8/23/09

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Ying Escalona 24 August 2009

i hope there be new economic theories...that is recently discovered....such as, consumer pump priming (JT Benz Theory) ..and not the government....where only few can benefit...especially countries has corrupt leaders

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