Jonah Goldberg‘s latest National Review Online column suggests President Obama has been “seduced” by experts’ predictions and plans.
Obama and his advisers predicted the economy would do better — much better — than it has, and those predictions were wrong. The president blames events: the European debt crisis, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the political tsunami of the 2010 elections. Some of that is plausible, but the two years of anemic job and economic growth that preceded those events can hardly be blamed on them. An earthquake in Japan didn’t make Obama’s green-jobs initiative a bust, and the euro crisis didn’t render “shovel-ready jobs” a myth. And it’s those failures that have scuttled Obama’s plans for an easy reelection in 2012 and left him and his supporters stunned and shocked. …
… The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The Left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it’s going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don’t have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.
No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.
