But the “practical” politician, who, in spite of such experiences repeated generation after generation, goes on thinking only of proximate results, naturally never thinks of results still more remote, still more general, and still more important than those just exemplified.

I’m so offended by the latest Obama canard, that the financial crisis of 2007-2008 cost less than 1% of GDP, that I barely know where to begin. Not only does this Administration lie on a routine basis, it doesn’t even bother to tell credible lies. .And this one came directly from the top, not via minions. It’s not that this misrepresentation is earth-shaking, but that it epitomizes why the Obama Administration is well on its way to being an abject failure.

The hard truth—and you don’t see it addressed in news reports—is that the middle class is disappearing in large part because technology is rendering middle-class skills obsolete.

It’s like that old Woody Allen quote: “I think my brain is my most important organ–but look who’s telling me that!”

Dan Ariely’s book discussed a pre-school in Israel where a day care center started charging a fee for parents who were late picking up their children, only to see the number of late pick-ups rise–apparently once there was a fee, parents no longer felt guilty about being late. The day care then rescinded the fee, but the norm–“don’t pick up your kids late” had already been broken; now parents simply concluded that there was no penalty at all, and the problem became even worse.

A so-called lowering of “real” interest rates by means of money pumping is basically an act of a diversion of real wealth from wealth generators to various nonproductive activities. Hence, contrary to popular thinking, the Fed’s attempt to lower the real interest rate in fact leads to a higher real interest rate. (The Fed does not have control over people’s time preferences.)

We are born into this world believing that success in anything will be met with praise and acclaim. We are not often told the truth that we see in this film: success is more likely to be met by envy, hate, disparagement, put downs, and loathing, sometimes from the most unexpected sources.

If the other side is unaware that you’ve won, your victory can’t be too compelling. And so I rather feel that the winning isn’t even the point; the real point is simply to be able to tell your fellow travellers that we beat them. And moreover, that this victory was a small step in a crucial cosmic battle, because they are really dreadful slime, full of stupidity and malice. Hence, as Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson have been noting, the prevalence of arguments that don’t really make any constructive point at all; they seem mostly designed to decrease the relative status of the other group. It’s like eighth grade, with white papers.

When you think about it, this suits the definition of irony. Why are voters so willing to “throw out the bums”? Because they think they can’t get much of anything done. Why can’t they get much of anything done? Because they’re afraid that bipartisan compromise will get them thrown out of office.

The latest SIGTARP (Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program) report is, if such a thing is possible, even more damning than its previous quarterly reports. It slams the Treasury for abject failure to meet the program’s own objectives, its lack of proper control and metrics, its “Mission Accomplished” declarations, its phony accounting, particularly with regard to AIG, and its abject failure on loan modifications (note one of TARP goals was to preserve homeownership. The Economic Populist has a good summary of the report. It’s distressing to see that this account, which is unusually forthright in its criticism because the performance of the TARP is so terrible, get short shrift in the MSM and even in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, this suggests that Team Obama is proving Jospeh Goebbels to have been correct: tell a big enough lie and keep repeating it, and the public will eventually come to believe it. And the lie is the one the Administration has been hawking for some time, that TARP was a success.