Smart People

If I wanted to research the Tea Party, I would not send Katie Couric to interview Sheryl Crow for Glamour magazine. But then again, it would not occur to me to ask for Shakira’s advice on immigration law.

Prompted by Ms. Couric, Ms. Crow recently informed Glamour readers that all Tea Partiers are uneducated, angry, and ignorant. She forgot to say racist and violent - perhaps she should have wrote a list on her palm. The mainstream media was happy to run with "uneducated" in a woofing contest that lasted three days.

This past March I spoke at an event that the media described as a Tea Party, so I guess that makes me a Tea Partier. There were over a dozen speakers at the event, all of us university educated, most with graduate degrees and several with doctorates. Granted, our degrees are only in economics, law, medicine, and commerce, not something rigorous like, say, music appreciation; but uneducated would not be an appropriate description for either the speakers or the crowd.

And besides, those really, really, really smart people in Washington who sneer with contempt for us common folk don’t have any reason to gloat.

Those really smart people spent $700 billion on a stimulus plan that didn’t stimulate. Every firm they took over to avoid bankruptcy went bankrupt. They gave $750 billion to banks that didn’t need it. They bought Freddie and Fannie to stop them from bleeding millions every month; now they bleed billions.

When those really smart people played nice with North Korea, Li’l Kim sank a South Korean destroyer. When they put the sanction beat-down on Iran, I’m-a-bad-Jihad told them to go pound enriched uranium. They sent a retired smart guy to fix the Israeli/Palestinian conflict once and for all, and he managed to get Turkey caught up in it. Their hand-picked commander mutinied on them in Afghanistan.

Mexican drug lords invade Arizona and those really smart people put up a sign. Millions of barrels of oil invade the Gulf beaches and they count life jackets and check the date on fire extinguishers. Their anti-terrorist plan is apparently to hope that bad guys continue to blow duds while they dither around about Gitmo.

Those really smart people have Cabinet Secretaries ordering Under Secretaries to tell Deputy Secretaries to fetch coffee for Czars. They have commissions that study committee reports on task force recommendations. Their Senators don’t ask, and their Supreme Court nominees don’t tell. They boycott states they can’t find on a map.

The Smartest One went personally to get us the Olympics and got stiffed. He went to get us Climate Change and got stiffed. He went to the G20 twice to get them to spend as much borrowed money as he does and he got stiffed both times.

The President of the European Central Bank recently called the smart people’s economic philosophy "incorrect", and the head of the European Union said our fiscal policies have put us on "the road to hell".

Just how bad do you have to be at running a government for the Europeans to think you suck at it? When Cash-4-Kias is your best stuff, even the Greeks laugh.

All those really smart people spent a whole year on a health care bill that none of them read and none of us wanted; now they find a two-scoop smart guy – Harvard professor and head of a think tank – to run it. He says he doesn’t believe in market forces; he says he only trusts "leaders with plans".

Note to Dr. Berwick: every bankrupted CEO is a leader with a plan; every defeated general is a leader with a plan; every tin horn dictator is a leader with a plan; Jimmy Carter was a leader with a plan; the Detroit Lions have a leader with a plan. Market forces eat leaders with plans for lunch, as you are about to discover. Buckle up.

We tried all this stuff before. In May of 1939, President Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau had this to say about the New Deal our modern day smart people so revere: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work…..We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started, and an enormous debt to boot".

The Liberty movement is not complicated: the socialists are ruining our country, and we are trying to stop them before they finish the job. You don’t need a Grammy to understand the choice and you don’t need a Ph.D. from Georgetown to pick a side. You need only to decide whether their theories are worth your liberty.

Well, are they?


"Moment Of Clarity" is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment