Sarah Palin should challenge Obama to a basketball game

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, Ala., 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 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 the 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.