Sarah Palin should challenge Obama to a basketball game

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 10/12/10

Obama hopes to bring the dead to life. All of the old American cities from the industrial period left barren and empty, but surrounded by prosperous rings. They were never really cities. Most of them – long dead - were ad hoc industrial zones. He wants to kill the prosperous rings that have grown around them in the past 30 years and awaken the dead centers. His plan to rebuild 150,000 miles of roads, “enough to circle the world six times” is the Keynes/Marx hybrid on steroids. It is preposterous. Rhetoric as tall and empty as those absurd, towering statues of Kim Jong-il. The strategy today is that if the approach failed in the first two years, pitch it again, only louder. This president has no experience whatsoever outside the hallowed halls of academia and on the basketball court. He has no judgment whatsoever and has left America today dangerously vulnerable. And Sarah Palin could probably challenge him on the basketball court, one on one.

Possibly we were great before we were good. Like Brett Favre, last night at the Meadowlands. And Randy Moss. Both born great but like last night again, not good. And possibly on the verge of implosion.

At an event at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, last Sunday, author, traveler and legendary investor Jim Rogers said the United States has had two central banks prior to the Federal Reserve and that they both disappeared. He said he fully expected the same thing to happen to the Federal Reserve. He charged that Ben Bernanke at the Fed only knows how to print money, and that this money printing policy of the Fed will cause it to collapse from within.

He said that the Great Britain was the world power of the 19th century, the United States the power of the 20th century and that China will be the world power of 21st century.

In the world-without-walls defined by the rise of American capital in the post-war period, money talks and rhetoric, even the Mile High Obama kind, soon yields to reality. Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose. And as Rogers said on Eric Bolling’s “Money Rocks” show, America is the greatest debtor nation “in the history of the world.”

A point approached at the meetings of the International Monetary Fund in Washington where the NYTs reports, world leaders broadly agreed “that for the global economy to be more stable, imbalances between creditor countries like China and Germany and debtor countries like the United States and Britain have to be fixed.”

China and Germany are the creditor countries. The United States and England the debtor countries. How does that sound to the Churchill/Roosevelt nostalgicos in Washington, some of them pathologically yearning for “big war” like in World War II to boost the economy and make America united again. The place for these is D.C. jail, general population or psychiatric prison.

We are in an elemental way the opposite of China, our generous sponsor nation. China has a method for slow and prosperous growth: Confucius. And they have a method for slow and prosperous decline: Lao Tzu (and his student Sun Tzu, “The Art of War.”). We have dynamic strategies for growth as well. But our path of retreat is “crash and burn.” So it is hard for us to see a path ahead.

But Obama’s method; repeat the past, is even worse. When we fail we don’t start again with a clean slate. We start with an ungodly burden.