Remember President Obama saying, over and over, and over and over again, that we should “think about what’s happening in countries like Spain”, among other European social democratic examples he trotted out depending on the stump speech, if we wanted to see his model for centrally planning a “green economy”.
Readers of Power Grab or other of my scribblings know how it is level ground that those countries deeply harmed themselves with precisely those schemes. These nations now are uniformly cutting back on the boondoggles even as Obama recommits himself to recreating them here. And his dogmatic refusal to do anything but pump the gas faster and harder, despite scolding from those who now to varying degrees see what they have wrought, is scaring the heck out of U.S. markets.
So when, as the Irish Times headline today puts it, “Obama blames Europe woes for US economic ‘headwinds'”, you know we’re seeing something unusual transpiring.
On one level Obama is correct when blaming Europe’s woes for scaring markets in the U.S….markets scared about his drive to impose that which caused Europe’s woes, here (well articulated by Alan Meltzer in today’s WSJ). As I alluded in a post on a different site, it is unfortunate when a president is so fixated on blaming others. Intentionally or otherwise, he tends to miss what’s actually going on.
Recreating their obviously costly schemes here is one thing. Recreating them after seeing that they in fact proved to be unsustainable disasters materially contributing to their teetering on an economic precipice is so much worse. But to then blame the Europeans for U.S. economic uncertainty in the face of this possibly tragic farce is pathological.
