…remaining original member of the crack White House Economics Team. Bloomberg is reporting that Larry Summers is expected to quit his post as director of the president’s National Economics Council after the November elections. Other members who’ve abandoned ship include Peter Orzag, who paddled away after announcing his resignation in June, and Christina Romer, who announced in August she’d be disembarking.
This is not exactly a confidence-inspiring situation. I guess no one wants to be responsible for the economy. What should we think about this? I think they’re kind of trapped, really. You see, Washington has always wanted us to believe that they were competent to run the economy, that an economy of 300 million souls was something that could be managed in real time by highly-educated PhD-holding wise men. Now it seems that no one wants to be in the hot seat. Is the paradigm changing? Maybe they’re not really so competent at all. Maybe they’re about to be revealed as frauds and liars who were really just running a con that amounts to the same thing as cheating at cards.
Maybe we the people can achieve some kind of genuine economic liberty on the other side of whatever’s coming, once enough people see that the federal “managers” of the economy are a bunch of charlatans. Wouldn’t that be nice.
